Featured Poet of January: Christine Hamm

On Dying in the Kings County ER

You slip from your wheelchair
to the floor: it’s too dark outside
in the tiny windows, too late at
night, the sky all one dark pupil,
and the coffee machine
at the nurses’ station is broken.

An orderly kicks your foot, perhaps
she hears a sigh from somewhere
else, thinks it’s you, believes you
are still breathing.

Dead, the smudged linoleum
is cool along your cheek.  You
don’t mind it so much. The last six months,
the stroke made everything a pain
in the ass; your fingers refused
to unpeel from pencils,
the smirk in the garbage man’s eye
made you throw books, and your children
kept switching their names.

Now you have no name.  Your fingers
and toes get colder, a peculiar heaviness
fixes you to the floor but your muscles
no longer ache, your bowels no longer
sing their bombastic, unhappy tune.

Somewhere, a TV high on a wall
is playing “Cheers” and you finally
feel your skin brightening, lifting
to the tempo of the laugh track.

A man with a dark hat is touching
your chair, a nurse is knelt at your
wrist, but you are hot now, feeling
the sun as you did that day

at the beach in Coney Island:
a new bikini, a new strip of skin
burning at the top of your hips,
wringing your wet hair
into some smiling boy’s face, laughing
and shrieking as he grabbed your arm, and

it’s that kind of burning now, that kind of
joy, as the room glows beneath you and
more people gather, and more attention
comes, all too late to tie you down.

The Wicker Gate

We are all waiting by the gate. Down below us, water slaps in irregular movements against the stone. In the shadows the ripples are grey and green, sometimes brown. In the light, we can see only white reflections, a trapped sun. The children finally collapse in the dirt, rubbing their fingers in the dust and sucking them. Parents lift their children by the hand, try to get them to stand. The children slide down slowly as if the bones in their legs have turned to syrup. They hold the fallen maple leaves to their ears, crinkle the dry red back and forth.

The older children try to walk but the sounds under their feet stop them. They lift their sandals gingerly, distracted by the rustle. The parents continue to walk in circles, talking on their cell phones or staring morosely at the sky, waiting for the gate to open.

Evidence of The Divine

the way a woman’s hair feels
when it hangs over the seat
in front of you on the bus

the way the leaves taste
when you lean over the fence
of your neighbor’s garden
and steal from the mint bush

the first time you see a girl’s
naked calves on the subway
this spring

the way you can
tell your lover’s dancing
in the other room when the door’s closed,
the way the light shifts in patches: dark then bright

Tristessa

we gave each other horse names
and galloped around the edges
of the soccer field during recess
I held strands of your long soft pelt
behind you as if they were reins
we clucked to each other when
we wanted to move, the clicking
of the tongue riders use along with
their heels, a sound like stuttering
cicadas, when the boys hit you and
made you fall down I hit them back

you were twelve and you used pills,
not very many, the first time you tried
to unravel

Resting State

The sun sloshes through the sky,
shadows seep across the carpet
& the coiled sheets, back up the
wall to that crack that appeared
a year ago on Christmas, the day
the year dies, but not us, never
us, caught in our dreaming,
the cats scratching the bedroom
door into glyphs shouting their hunger
and need, they are lonely, they want
to lick our noses clean, want to bite
us, starting at our dumb toes.

“Evidence of The Divine” has previously appeared in Weave.  “Resting State” has previously appeared in Flashquake and in Christine Hamm’s chapbook The Animal Husband.

Christine Hamm is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Drew University. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript, Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in The Adirondack Review, Pebble Lake Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, and many others. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English and poetry writing at Rutgers University. The Transparent Dinner, her book of poems, was published by Mayapple Press in 2006. Christine was recently named a runner-up to the Poet Laureate of Queens, and is a poetry editor for both Ping Pong, a journal published by the Henry Miller Library in Big Sur, and Scapegoat, a new online journal. For more about her, go to http://chamm.blogspot.com.

Tags: Hamm, outsider