Poetry By Wren Hanks

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Humid Heartaches

Francis hid the snuff of ambition, the halter tops and trellis tattoos, all the ways his existence particular-ed – from them he hid his sea and air, his humid heartaches.

He existed in quiet love, the first curl of a nepenthes pitchers, the first host of Ohio lampreys feasting to spawn. He existed in sea, atoms of air, in the churning loam, in the churning guts of predatory fishes. He existed as wolf spiders descending on small-town fruit baskets.

The sea existed inside him, as ever, lakes of salt : torpedoes of plankton.

They demanded to see his molars, my scars and nipples. They were always calling possibility abomination.

He salted his body for deer tongues and kisses from flies. He had an albino corn snake, but together they made a gentle chimera.

They demanded pectorals from which wolverines emerged, scarlet-muzzled. Hammers for hands,
but he grew epiphytes with furred roots. They demanded he love loudly.






PINK SPACE

I avert my man’s eyes    I pick the lint from between     my orchid sequins           I was thinking

about the crushing         pressure exerted on the un-      iverse by God’s love      Francis says

scrolling                               through iNaturalist                       Francis opens Scruff      with a dainty

fingertip                               Inside the mind of god                  a beefcake’s                       waxed chest

I kiss my man & we hold each other while I sip a soda with adaptogens, a chaser of small c catholic water.  Francis walks away, into florid clouds. The sun bursts behind us like a gusher. Francis makes time for god’s painted chariots. Francis makes time for blue dream shrimp &, once, an office chair made of dead mycelium.

I kiss Francis for two days straight. We hold ourselves precious behind each other’s ears, like wire daisies. We keep all our clothes on, a platonic dream of plate tectonics, two men as continents in lock-step. When I hold Francis I hold myself, across some cheesy continuum of calcium carbonate & Pleistocene moss feasts; shared taxa, shared beds of barrier reefs, peat, succulent soil, & unopened gas bills.

I kiss my man & the bottom falls out of the cricket protein market. All those orthopterans freeze and starved no more. The mind of god is gay & his gut is lacto-ovo, at very least. My man talks to blue fairies on Savannah nights, full of leg song, & I grow jealous & pick at my sequins.  My man buys me Leopold’s, & I lick Savannah Socialite down to the cone.


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Wren Hanks is the author of Lily-livered (Driftwood Press), winner of the Adrift Chapbook Contest, and The Rise of Genderqueer (Brain Mill Press). He is an alum of the Tin House Workshop and the Lambda Writer's Retreat for Emerging LGBTQ Voices, and he was recently awarded a 2026 Vermont Studio Center residency. HIs recent writing appears in Foglifter, No Tokens, Diode, The Journal, and elsewhere. He is an editor for smoke and mold and lives in Brooklyn, where he works in animal advocacy. You can find more of his writing at wrenhanks.com.​​