GABRIELLE GRACE HOGAN / 5 POEMS
Would You Notice If I Left You
Take it from me: a city is no more a city
than it is a chance to break all your teeth.
The buildings—how tall, the whisper-brutal
fall that could happen, just like that.
Would that the bird become the building
it perches on—stubborn, lean, capable.
Would that the urgency of our dwelling
would dwell in us. The water widening
past the harbor’s belt,
the algae limp as wrists.
A tight fist of beads broken off the string.
A sunny day at the umbrella convention.
I’m afraid of everywhere.
There is nowhere left to be.
R drunk-texts me when he’s having sex.
His Grindr boy-parade, their flower mouthfuls,
the strong jaws of their thumbs—he is enjoying something.
I am happy for him. I break off another limb of sleep.
The sun is gone, the dog brutally beaten
behind the barn, the snow we are not built for
repulsed by melting.
Sweet rime on a lime’s rind.
We mourn demolished buildings,
but not the people in them.
We say we do, but most of us
lie. When I would get words wrong,
Alice would say language evolves—
what would it mean
to say wait & mean
a vestibule of honeyed bells?
To say come here & mean bridge?
To say stay & mean a ghost
with limbs, or the sharp small bulb
at the end of your smoke, or cliff-
diving, the time
between water & air where you
are circling the weight of your body
& its many possible outcomes?
Dyke in the Field
Steady bell leashed
to a dog-neck. Joy a bone
in the throat. I want to fold you
& run you over the plate’s
archipelago of butter.
The field at night, calm
& flat as cold white milk,
immovable as a floorplan,
steadfast as a door-hinge.
You gotta keep it focused.
Small in the greatness
of white light-flutter,
barreling into the taut,
rubbery panther-black.
Piss-drunk, high
as a bullet in the neck—
I am, I am.
We just did poppers.
It felt good.
I wish you were here.
I bend against the rapturous wind.
Ecclesiastical inebriation.
Smile that elbows grief
out of the way.
Satellites constellate
like tiny god-stars.
Moon like a silver dollar
in the mall fountain.
From the fountain, coins
gleam like fish. The light gold
as piss flowing through the river
that leads me home to
you. I couldn’t fall for someone
who I knew couldn’t miss me.
I am yours,
as a pale purple sky
meets the wing of a starling
in low flight—
with everything in it.
While I Was Away
Memory is messy company. Eyeless with perfect vision.
While I was away, the buildings got taller & now they sling
hunched shadows like wedding-rice across the asphaltic altar.
Guess I’ll take that drink.
Play a round of Go Fish with Tarot.
Hey, you can’t blame me for any desecration here.
I’m grieving. I just don’t know how to explain what exactly.
Osteophone instruments the bones,
cleaves sounds from skeletal manipulation.
I can’t stop imagining a violin of femurs now.
Bone-led orchestra.
I write “love poems” like a dog
licks its own ass—indulgently.
I don’t like body-memory, its corrosive insistence—
how her hands frighten the blush out of me.
How the phone settles in the lap
like snakeskin in a Ziploc.
How my pleasure becomes a rope
too high to reach.
It’s not sexy to just lay there. It’s not complimentary to your performance.
I am wedded to intense privacies,
I’m sorry.
The rat in the attic, the pills on the nightstand.
These vaccine waters, these copper-greened knuckles.
I find my body unsettled to the most elastic degree.
It is frightened, the curved cave of a hand cupping a spider—
how does it not assume the death of the universe in that moment?
I want you to know when you touch me,
it is enough.
It is more than enough has ever been.
I just don’t trust what my body will do with it.
A heartbeat at the ocean’s bottom. Fucking terrifying.
But I’m gripping the steering wheel of your hands with every strength in me.
Bury me in your orchestral tremble.
I’ll find my way through it somehow.
The Present Tense
I sit in a field, cooled
by the hunched wet
grass. Above, an umbrella
of gold light. Beyond the light,
there is the field,
details faded as an oil painting,
something that looks real
but if touched will only be flat.
Does the field exist beyond the light?
It must. The earth does not exist
just to bury things in it. The earth
like a hook on which to hang coats,
the earth like a hardened nipple. I run
barefooted to the pole in the center
of the field & back
& still exist, so it must.
My mother is afraid
I will be medicated forever.
As if a cherry could unhinge its stem.
I am sick of always looking
for the light—just let the dark be,
for the time it needs. It is not here
to hurt you. Each dark
like your mother cupping your vomit.
Each pill not the truth but
the representation of the truth.
I don’t want to be saved,
just to be in this dark
for the time I need to be.
I took the TV for a lake.
I took the stage for a garden.
The field, a breast heaving.
Shifting From One Foot to the Other
I keep doing this thing where I play one song
until it breaks off into blue feathers. Silver dust.
It is a comfort to unease the spark
until the song can be thrown over the shoulder
like a sleeping child, or an injured dog.
If you play a song enough times, it won’t
stick anymore, loving glue shaved from
construction paper. Most things are not timeless—
stars that become skulls that become dirt.
The balcony of rotted wood that could collapse like a lung.
I don’t know why it’s so hard to love somebody.
I wish I could find a home in anyone, yellow windowsill, hip-sway.
My shudder-swept fingers dangle over the bed’s edge
like the limp stems of flowers. I miss her, & by that I mean
I miss the act of being missed in return.
My body aches & I ache for bodies.
Your body a long white candle, peeled wax like citrus fruit.
I don’t want to watch you put your sweater on & leave out the back door.
I don’t want to lose all my friends.
I don’t want the song to become so small I lose it in my pocket,
knowing it’s there, that it must be, because things do not simply disappear,
& yet.
This isn’t a love poem
but isn’t it?
isn’t everything?—
Gabrielle Grace Hogan is a poet currently living in Austin, TX while she pursues her MFA from the New Writers Project. Her work has been published by Nashville Review, Kissing Dynamite, DIAGRAM, and others. She's worked as the poetry editor of Bat City Review, and coeditor of You Flower / You Feast, an online anthology inspired by the music of Harry Styles. Her debut chapbook Soft Obliteration is available from Ghost City Press. Her social media and projects can be found on her website, gabriellegracehogan.com.