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  • Home
  • About/Submissions
  • Masthead
  • Featured Poets Series
    • 3 poems by Chris Prewitt
    • 3 poems by Taylor Byas
    • 3 Poems by David Hanlon
    • 3 poems by Bailey Grey
    • 2 Poems by Seán Griffin
    • 1 Poem by Jarrett Moseley
    • 3 Poems by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor
  • Issues
    • Issue 1
    • Issue 1.5: Hozier-inspired
    • Issue 2
    • Issue 3: Recovery
    • Issue 3.5: Lana Del Rey
    • Special Summer Solstice Prose Issue
    • Issue 4.1
    • Issue 4.2
    • Still Standing

3 Poems by Hannah Cajandig-Taylor

Effigy
 
 
I have been bleeding               
 
                                             for half of my life
                                                                 by now—cadmium             veins,
 
                                                                                                   spider legged vessels
 
 
                                                                  & feathers wet,  my aching
                           
 
                          teeth & skin demarcated. You           scraped me out—       
 
                                                                                 planted daisies
                                                                           in my carcass. Is the blueblack night              
 
                                                   more than a cross
                                                                section of dark tissue
 
 
 
paper wrapped over my heavy eyes.
 
                                                                                             Is this self
                                                                                                            sacrifice.         
           
 
                                     Is this              falling,
                                               
                                                              or is this letting go.

First Snow
 
Bluepink snow curls into piles outside. When hunger sets in,
             you let it. November calls
for blizzards & intimate conversations & celebrating
            Halloween a week late, carving
miniature pumpkins with off-white skin & wearing tulle to become
            the girl in a Midwestern fairy tale. The roaring of rivers
sharpens to quiet ice, the glacial streams wanting to be crossed & you want to
             dance until your not-glass boots seep through
 the frozen mud, your toes numb but you always been comfortable with losing
              feeling in your aching feet. Fragments of chilled water drift
in a kaleidoscope of winter. You reach in, clasping the pieces until you feel them
              grow smaller & smaller & this will be the moment you walk
further into the woods, fracturing                    among the scatters of light. 

Situations
previously appeared in Cajandig-Taylor's chapbook ROMANTIC PORTRAIT OF A NATURAL DISASTER (Finishing Line Press, 2020)
 
            One would think that broken zippers
& unspooled cuckoo-clocks
might fit the category—or lipstick pink
doll dresses with torn pockets,
or waking up a half hour too late
             for my great grandfather’s funeral.
 
             I am fleeting with nightmares, my brain
spun out of funnel clouds. Storms are
circumstantial, beauty is situational
& I am still distracted
             by a sinkhole eating Detroit.
 
             In Pennsylvania, a town has been
spouting hellfire for years. Everyday
is the end of the world, each season
braiding a noose
from the daffodil yellow roots
             below my clouded window.
 
             Don’t let it rot you—this notion
of fixing & unfixing
& calling it closure. Don’t
keep track of the days
              & deaths & paper clocks.
 
              Call this something else. Call this
anything but desirable. 
Call this being in love
with any situation
              on the brink of collapse. 

Hannah Cajandig-Taylor resides in the Upper Peninsula, where she is an editor for Passages North. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Gordon Square Review, Drunk Monkeys, FlyPaper Lit, Lunate, Coffin Bell Journal, and Third Point Press, among others. She has been nominated for a Best Small Fictions award and still plays Nancy Drew games on her computer.  
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