Stephanie Moves Out

by hannah

comments by:

Mytili


A shirt flies up, folds itself
Into a box.  What is this?

An interruption.  I try on a skirt                                             
And it cinches.  I am slendered

With the compliment.  Khaki
Pants and pants and pants and

A wrinked shirt fly behind the couch.
The cardboard becomes Oklahoma, and

She leaves six days later to reclaim
A tornado born in 1962.

What the carpet?  What the music
>From her corner of the room?

What the quiet and the quiet?
What our separate heat, mine

Of Philadelphia, hers of summer
In a place that warm all year?                                                 

I horror at the shelf.  It bites
Back with dust and the grit

Of a place we didn't clean even
In September.  The ceiling curdles,

The walls part and the boxes
Loaf-and-fish themselves.

I live with a gape-maw?
An mute window?  Twice a door?
                                                                               




Accourding to Mytili Jagannathan:

Date: Thu, 20 May 1999 14:43:23 -0400 (EDT)
From:  mytilij@dept.english.upenn.edu (Mytili Jagannathan)

Hi hubverse--I loved reading Hannah's poems for her departing
roommate--particularly the double-play on "condensing" as dewing and
collapsing, the surprise of trying to imagine a surface "licked with
sugar" and also the collapsing of time--the "yesterday lover" and the
"tomorrow car" against the oddly stretching, emptying present.  Hannah,
what a vivid and wonderful sendoff gift!                                       

--Mytili