Tasia M Hane

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I’ve Never Been Cut Short 

like a bird at its last landing, eye wet and alive with pain, reflecting winter sky over the lake, flat white plain of downtown that makes me want to reach out to close it, but there’s no time, traffic keeps me moving beyond the dying bird, beyond even the man who says can I ask you a question? and before I can stop myself I say no, thank you like he’s offered me a gum wrapper, a shoulder, what it means to want what one has and be content, as though he’s handing me the brilliance of new flight or the tight pinch of the lungs’ thrill right before freezing, right before I step off the curb

**

This is Here, Too

(threnody for Erik)

it’s raining when my brother calls from a payphone in Milwaukee, right outside a prison, to ask me if I am a bitch. that’s the word he uses when I let the voicemail record his holiday greeting, his wet coil of empty vein unspooling in brittle reverie of what I must be doing instead of rushing, jumping to pick up the call before it slides to the automated bliss of a one-sided conversation. I eat an apple and play his message, drink some milk and listen to the words, I chew a piece of bread and wipe my mouth with the sharp of my hand just as he really gets going with the screw you and do you really think you can do this to me you stupid cunt. later I play it on speakerphone so I can understand where he’s coming from, his perfect penal dialect, that’s some shit right there. just as he tells me to fuck myself, no, get that dyke wife to do it for you, he slips, unsteady, now a low machine spitting curls of blond childhood: airborne, snapping a wrist on the curb, another time his elbow, then his chin split like a seed, red stream as he runs up the carpeted stairs to the kitchen, our mother’s head lolling on a thin stick of neck while I clean up the blood, tend the fracture, how can I not answer the phone

his messages play on a loop, tell the bruises, the audible map of the same neighbourhoods, the same spaces, the same faces cupping our adolescence until it spills over the brim and we are lost riding the steadfast boats of our bodies to our respective places: knocked up, in jail, dead. no visible lines stretch these threads to clutch at a needleless eye, to slip past and lie groundless until we are all that we have left, until one of us lets go and there is only one, listening, again, turning up the volume on a recorded message with no audience

**

American Summer

unfortunate age without a name, each of us romantic. this bleak dialect stammers home beneath blue-green longing, bright flash of midsummer in this two-winter town. budge me, and budge me with a thousand would-be could-bes, each of them a slow burn of never mind, of possibility, finally, and yes. now put me back in, unmoored from gratitude, introduce me to the faint sped whisper of trees, the bulging bridge underneath this gray gate and dead air. we know the conclusion, so tell me its first lines, unrumple the glasses’ fat cooling and surface, the space of yesterday, the forgetting tomorrow

**

Composition

we are splintered deep glassine-flickered surface, to tell. the lights glare in these hotel windows, fogged with a noonday malaise, a rush-fine swelter to be gone from. I can feel your mouthful at the sink, at my brush-halted lip (one pink soapflake curling in the dish), my eyes still, dry in the moist empty of. I won’t give this, but keep it close, watching the steam rise, I won’t give this, crooning over blanks, willing stones, I won’t give this, flight after blanch and scatter, I won’t give this, nothing, words whispered in a paper cup

**

Photographs

It’s Wednesday, I’m dressing the kids for school, so I think he’s joking, an old joke, one he’s told before, at gas stations and in long-distance calls, your mother’s dead, he says to the machine, and then, later, bad luck, the sergeant says to me, as though I’ve a worm in my shoe, or a pebble, and this is a race, my aunt demanding, cheering me on, saying take photos of every naked inch and send them to me for psychic interpretation, to divine the spaces between my father’s intentions, and we will not compare our grief, she says, but be objective: a sister, a daughter, don’t forget between the toes as I’m in the grocery store now looking at cans of beans, so many beans, and instead I send the undertaker, my mother’s floating head unzipped, crushed pillow of dyed blonde hair, he emails me a picture, the subject line a number so that I am startled when I see her appear, as large as any photo in the news of bodies under bloodied sheets, her head on my screen, though I can’t take possession of her body without my father’s approval, just one condition, as a uniformed officer takes him to the morgue: “She looks terrible,” he says to me, the first time we’ve spoken in years, “she looks terrible,” he says, the line receding, “you can have her.”

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Tasia M Hane spends much of her time navigating liminal spaces. You can find her poetry, fiction, and nonfiction in Baltimore Review, Tar River Poetry, New York Quarterly, The Laurel Review, Quarter after Eight, Hippocampus Magazine, Sou’wester, and Third Coast, among other journals. She holds a PhD from Case Western Reserve University.