~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Sara Henning

Galveston, Texas

When Brown Pelicans torpedo

the Texas coast, flare their gular pouches

to sieve for prawns, they look

like bombs falling from the sky.

Tell me that the world is on the verge

of ending, and I’ll believe you.

Wings clutched to plunge,

like guns, they unfurl for the cock.

Sea-shocked, I watch them cull

through spume, clutch up kill.

In a moment’s flash, they rise

back to the world of the living.

Since noon, they’ve slashed past

my condo’s glass. Even the wind

seems complicit, brutalizing dunes,

whipping away umbrellas shanked

into sand. Pod, squadron, fleet—

such warlike names for creatures

who loiter in the shallows like yachts.

I don’t want the miracle of a hunt

to end at the surface, the way time

or pelican arrows its hunger into any

wave’s brine-bruised crest. It is nearly

evening. Tell me prawn shell

pried open resembles a heart

and I’ll believe you. Pelicans,

they dive as if they have nothing,

everything to live for.

Christmas Quarantine

When oak limbs gut my mother’s axle, she’s speeding.

Rain. Fog. Seventy on Simonton Bridge Road.

She stutters the brake against the coming shunt—tires

churned open, ripped gator guts. She called it

Murphy’s Law, when troubles, like tires, unclench from steel.

Knees down, she tracks her Motorola flip phone

through dirt pools, torn throats of fast-food bags. The phone

still rings. Christmas 2005, and my mother speed

-dials me from Georgia, as though my voice can steal

her back from night’s holdup. Every road

ends in disaster, she says. Fate’s callboy

screwing her over. Christmas, she says, tires her.

Blunt trees tinseled with ghosts. Her spare tire

won’t last thirty miles. She exhales cigarette smoke into the phone.

This Christmas, I get another kind of call—

my husband lunched with someone sick. Coronavirus, speeding

through breath, hangs in the air. Some animal rode raw

and mean. We’re contact traced. I steel

myself for the reckless weather of tests, the way steel’s

amplitude submits to frost or burning. I’m this tirade

of physics, quarantined. My body a road

converging. I don’t expect to hear the phone

ring on Christmas day, a nurse’s voice speeding

through diagnosis: COVID-negative. Her callous

rush of syllables clip and drawl. They’re a calling

card, lovely and crude as my mother’s steel

-blue eyeliner, spritz of Jovan Musk. The speed

of longing glazes everything I touch. Tired,

I put a record on. Vince Guaraldi’s piano

rekindles my memory of Charlie Brown. I ride

the slur of arpeggios like my mother rides

the shoulder of Simonton Bridge, already stranded, calling

my name. Rain. Fog. A shattered flip phone

glitzing through mud. Memories like steel

undulant in their shame. I’m tired

is the heart of any elegy. Grief’s speedometer,

tires lashing. It’s Christmas again. My mother’s dead.

The cry of the piano lurks in the air, steals

its way into me. It rides my body home.

Sara Henning is the author of View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018) and Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022). Her collection of poems, Burn, was chosen as a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection and will be published by Southern Illinois University Press in 2023. She is an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Marshall University. Email: henningsdpoet@gmail.com