~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Hannah Marshall

Incorruptible

Broken blue sea, you hold

the mahogany

dry above your lines.

Rows of tropical arbor,

sunscreen

and baseball-cap ardor,

US-claimed islands

of amputated voting rights,

staked rows of seedlings,

plantation sugar

and charcoal, cigarbox cedar

and mahogany.

Over-harvested shine,

each waxen petal

returns red in southern spring.

The tide,

the spines of ships,

Swietenia mahagoni

as fortepiano and the wooden bars

of marimba, as peeled layers

of a Gibson Les Paul,

as the splintered hull

which harbored

a young John F. Kennedy.

Did I once, in the Gulf,

hold my child hand

to your sharp dark?

Endangered and sheltering,

picked piecemeal from ships’ cabins

and railroad parlor cars.

You harbor

what returns after

and what came before.

How To Be Saved, If You Are a Body

A fallow field filled with deadnettle,

the slope to the ditch tumbling in violets,

unmown yards rising up in henbit.

And the jagged sidewalk where I plod

over mud puddles. And the black chest

in the laundry room where I sit

while my husband shrugs on his wool jacket,

and with it, the weight of all days.

How long since I walked along a river?

Since the herons threatened with their sword-beaks,

their legs tensed for the immense effort

of flight? Am I lost or saved beside the waters?

The starlings grubbing

between bright blots of spring beauties.

I want to enter all things as a child

lying on her stomach with her head in the open arch

of oak roots. To open the red of every tulip

like a tongue between teeth, to find the space

where the universe is, all its immensity

bound and springing up from one sticky stamen.

I am redeemed inside the daffodil’s cup

and the star of the periwinkle.

My body is lost among pine boards

and found in the damp cool of the garage

as I grip trowel and pink plastic pot,

as I sow cosmos and zinnias with my daughter

out on the crumbling cement steps.

The cardinal sings loud as liturgy,

a recitation of creed, a salvation story.

Hannah Marshall lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works at the public library. Marshall’s poem, “This Is a Love Poem to Trees,” appears in The Best American Poetry 2021. Her poems have also been published in New Ohio Review, The American Journal of Poetry, I-70 Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Her manuscript The Shape That Good Can Take was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She received her MFA in creative writing from Converse University. Website: https://hannahmarshallpoet.com