Prosperity
By Margery Hannah
Sand falls to the platter
of dry branches resting
in a baby cardboard box
I bless you and lower my gaze
wipe greased palms
on linen white
Drop it in the box
Chant, “Prosperity, prosperity, prosperity”
Match the platter with burning light
Now, spit upon the flames
You are now a footstool
for dreams abundant
Fig Trees
By Margery Hannah
I want to be the red dot beaming
on canvas bleached
The Son I am to ears
bright of faces without teeth
The Tupac of despair, the Pryor
of fears laughing
at tears dried by Martin’s dream
In A Revolutionary Life, John Lee Anderson wrote Che Guevara had a sense of security only trust fund beneficiaries understand. Recently, I came across decade-old letters and emails I’d sent the administrator of my now dissolved family trust that made me both cringe at my audacity and smile at my courage. Funding requests for an automobile, back mortgage payments, gifts for my brothers, relocation, graduate school summer tuition, a kitchen remodel for mom’s home with a surprise truck on the side, and an appeal for funding to pay my housing for three years while earning an MFA in Creative Writing and Literature (a notably unprofitable degree I would complete a year early) littered my outbox and clear plastic file box. I imagined myself an attorney presenting my case for financial support on the latter matter, and with the beneficiaries—my two elder brothers, mother and I—evenly at odds on whether the trust should support my next academic endeavor in New York, I argued in the most upstanding manner I knew how, with a series of questions meant to illicit facts.
What non-Biblical book competes with Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales? I discovered Chaucer’s masterpiece back in Honors English 102 at WSU, courtesy of Dr. William Woods, and the lessons of honor, integrity, knighthood, and class have since with me remained. From its poetic prowess to its cultural notations, The Canterbury Tales is a medieval kindle still lit by the wisdom in Chaucer’s descriptions of competing storytellers and the twenty-four competing tales told by those characters, both representations of the various social classes. Never has an unfinished book been so complete.
How are the imaginations of New York City children fostered without the ability to look up and see stars? Perhaps the New York City skyline sufficiently espouses the greatness of man, placing a seed in the mind of its youth that all things are possible; maybe it is the sheer beauty of the lights sustainingContinue reading “Home Beyond Lodabar: From NYC to Wichita, Kansas and Back”
By the time I began visualizing what kind of sofa to manifest for my Moving On Up home during my divorced-in-my-mid-twenties years, mom announced she’d found it. “I saw your sectional at King’s,” she said during a standard unannounced drop-in, beckoning me into her Ford pick-up truck, bought with a secret appeal of on herContinue reading “Milo Baughman and Such Relics”
This memory (or is it a feeling or act?) of fear as instructed by the Almighty God telling me I MUST do what is right–right, a simple thing convoluted by either fleshly desire or the other thing, that much lesser thing roaming the earth to and fro looking for whom to devour, goes back asContinue reading “Storms Are But A Memory”