Sara Henning, Featured Poet

~ Delta Poetry Review ~

Sara Henning, Featured Poet

Sara Henning is the author of the poetry collections Burn (Southern Illinois University Press, 2024), a 2022 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Editor’s Selection; Terra Incognita (Ohio University Press, 2022), winner of the 2021 Hollis Summers Poetry Prize; and View from True North (Southern Illinois University Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Crab Orchard Series in Poetry Open Competition Award and the 2019 High Plains Book Award. She was awarded the 2015 Crazyhorse Lynda Hull Memorial Poetry Prize, the 2019 Poetry Society of America’s George Bogin Memorial Award, and scholarships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference and Appalachian Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in journals such as Crab Orchard Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Southern Humanities Review, Witness, Meridian, and the Cincinnati Review. She is an assistant professor of creative writing at Marshall University, where she coordinates the A.E. Stringer Visiting Writers Series.

Drive-in Nights

you know love when you see it,

you can feel its lunar strength, its brutal pull.

—Dorianne Laux, “Facts about the Moon”

The drive-in at the A.L. Mangham Jr. Regional Airport is mercy

tonight. Films projected on the side

of a plane hangar. We angle our Subaru, hitch

past rows of F-150s, that haze of silver and red. We kill

the lights. Tonight, it’s Die Hard, Bruce Willis firing

through radios tuned to 90.1 FM. The moon

could hang a convict, how it churns and glows. The moon

could raise us up in the image of its mercy.

Who would save us now? We pop the hatchback, fire

off the engine as John McClane and Holly side

-eye each other at Nakatomi Plaza. Winter-killed

fields behind us once held bluebonnets. I hitch

up my heels on the dash as John cops a look—hitching

off shoes to fix his nerves, he could be Armstrong walking on the moon.

I can’t resist a man who’d kill

for his woman, a Johnny-come-lately who mercies

no one. I married you, husband, when you side

-swiped my heart. Terrorists fire,

take hostages. Hans Gruber calls shots. Once, we caught fire

when we touched. In the fury of summer, got hitched.

We’ve fought, loved, made up in continuous cycles. It side

-saddled us, our hysterics. The moon,

like Jesus, wept. Watching old movies in the dark is no mercy,

just a mercy that saves us.

But John McClane? He kills

his way back, Beretta 92F, his voice over wire—

Yippie-kai-yay, Motherfucker! when he means mercy,

call me home. I know that bait and switch, that flint hitch.

I see it when I take off my clothes—moon

in my skin, you call it. That spectral heat. My side

of the car is cold. Even longing takes sides.

Husband, is this the life we hoped for? Would you kill

any crook who’d dare touch me? Would the moon

in your gun turn to blazing halo? Let’s fire

off hope like a fatal bullet. Let’s get hitched

again. Any merciful

justice of the peace must side with fire

when he sees it. Let’s kill the lights. Let’s hitch ourselves to mercy.

We’ll make the moon our savior tonight.

Olives

Small bitter drupes

Full of the golden past and cured in brine.

—A.E. Stallings, “Olives”

It’s the olive tooth

-pick-stabbed, odalisque sleek in

her martini bath

I can’t untaste now, olive

soaking her tired body

in Epsom, so bored

she’s glamorous. Iced gin, watch

it glisten her, steep

her in its aching mirage.

Like gasoline in hot air,

it kisses her hard.

She’s a brine-hallowed goddess

I leave for the end.

Or is she a little whale,

her belly soft with yearning?

I can’t resist her.

Fallen, pine-brusque, she’s calling

from her coup of glass—

olive, thick love. I pluck her

with my fingers. I eat her.

The Virgins’ Club

We’re a clutch of sophomores still French kissing pillows, zits like stars

in our skin. We pass Oxy 10 like joints between classes. The Virgins’ Club—

me, Kim Childers, Madeline Stein. We zip our too-tight jeans with coat hangers,

suck in our guts. We’re queens who lick cream from Oreos at lunch. Virgin—

like the record label, or a forest never touched by mankind. I watch girls

sneak hall passes, skip class to screw in cars. I’d drink virgin

daiquiris at parties where cool girls play beer pong, make out

with jocks during rounds of spin the bottle. Virgins make good wives,

I hear. Kim’s first, her boyfriend’s figure-four leg lock, like Ric Flair

putting the hurt on the Hulkster. Madeline uses her one-way ticket out of V-town

on a Brit across the pond. But mine I gift to a physics whiz who

deserts me for tournament rounds of Minecraft. If only I’d kept the verb

of my body, that mother of pearl, hushed in my shell. If only

I’d marry myself. Who doesn’t want a virgin, after all?

At thirty, I’ll meet you, man who takes me to bed and means it.

On our wedding night, I know I’ll never be virgin again.

A Brief History of Light

They will always be love letters,

closed caption transcriptions spooling across

the TV. My mother, hard of hearing,

watched her stories in silence.

Guiding Light, One Life to Live,

living room lit by two Tiffany lamps.

Deep-throated wisterias, peonies

etched against cream at the crown,

all of it cast sleek flames at the ceiling.

How many times did I stare into

a lampshade, its luster blunted through

coiled bronze wire and blown favrile,

the canopy of glass in rich charade

all night? Just like that, my knees dirt

-smeared again. Braid down my back,

I’m tilling mica from soil at recess,

swearing it would catch fire in my hands.

I imagined angels tunneling through

layers of earth, catching their wings

on oak roots, bricks, and those little wounds

lodging there, waiting for me

to dig them up with sticks. The way it

sieved light through its scratched surface,

nothing could compete, not the Goody’s

barrettes I’d spent whole hours unearthing

while other girls lost themselves in games

of freeze tag, not their tortoiseshell glare.

Queen of the hunt, I’d strut the cache

with me wherever I’d go. So when she died,

my mother, I grasped her lamps

as if I were pulling slivers of dirt-rough

mica from the earth, knowing their iridescence

could burn any house down.

“Terra Inferna”

When my mother died, I dreamed of a man

rough-sketching on gesso, palette knife scraping

the angles of a woman’s face. He knuckles

thin washes of color, the way a man might thumb

through a woman, exulting her, erasing her.

He’s famous for his horses, hunger-hardened

and sensual, pupils blown open by violence

or love. Others thrash with their hooves,

escapists hurling forward. I dreamed

of the teenage girl always ghosting the interior,

cut-off blue jeans, black camisole, smoke

clenching her body in its silt halo. There’s a Zippo

next to her, a crushed pack of Lucky Strikes.

Her off-frame stare says, Listen. It says, I want

to tell you everything. Once, a mare thrust

her muzzle into the shotgun window of his 1967

Chevy Nova—this was years ago—Tulsa,

a whole afternoon of hooky in the field off

Route 66 by the high school. Rabbits, tonguing

the husks off of sweet corn. His back,

sunburned as raw prayer, as the radio pulses

Van Morrison. The girl in the back seat,

offering him her body. The mare’s face

in the window is a flash, a sudden weapon.

She could break the young man reaching for her,

crush his hands with her jaw. She could bite

the girl until her skin gapes and slips,

flesh pooling in plush knots. I think of this image

when I close my eyes—a girl so lovely

it hurts to look at her, a mare wild enough

to end everything, a mane that smells

like sex, prairie fire, rabbits seething

their death song into the glare. The man

will call it some heart’s undoing, as if

to repeat the thing you most want will keep it

holy. Like the night his girl falls asleep,

her cigarette glimmering. He won’t be able

to unsee it—her soul lunging its muscled heat

into air, screams chased down by darkness.

Or the mare, always the mare—feral elegy

he’ll snare into oil, her mane so light-tangled

it could be burning.

Once, I Prayed in the Water

Blessed be the good-time girl thighs-deep in a striped inner tube

cattail fronds & cigarette butts lush against her toes blessed be

the empress of chic I was sixteen shellacked in Coppertone tangled

in a pick-up game of football her hands muscular birds

gripping deep through blitz & tackle all the jacked-up Fords

like piss drunk cicadas pulsing hymns through rolled-down windows

Stevie Ray and the Boss shredding through steam as I spread

my hips my legs & lunged I was the girl kissing boys in sit-top

kayaks another flea-chawed dog sun-blissed & brined as if

someone told her to breach is to breathe pretty baby it's time to blow

this mortal coil every minute of her life so I rode the twist & flush

of summer until even the stars couldn't look at me before I

was a woman sand-hardened late thirties I slipped like a fish

into spume I quaked all night in the weeds I fed on every shine

that would touch me so Lord, will you make a temple of the water

will you brandish your body in lake-skin for me I've had

enough of this lemon-swoon sfumato this musk-blaze of summer

genuflecting like a fool I've already buried the shame-slick

pretty young thing I was I smoked that queen when I kissed my mother

blown open by cancer watched strange men hoist her body

into an oven set to the temperature all things beautiful & terrible

begin to burn

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