Read More: A brief Q&A with Jennifer Hambrick
Raw Edge
– after Andrea Myers’ fabric sculpture Zig Zagged
Everything blows up in a cosmic second
and tears a life to rags and remnants,
leaving scraps of what had been a person
standing firm in the firmament floating
in a sea of chaos and confusion.
War widows bring their husbands’ suits
to my grandmother, who makes her pittance
trimming trousers into skirts, curving
boxy jackets to hourglass figures
new to punching timeclocks in a place
in every way so far from home. Bombs
and bloodshed blister the walls of domestic
tranquility, gouge out a no-woman’s-land
where every paycheck is a size too small
and hierarchy shears woman from onion skin
and pins her in place on futile fabric.
Wallflower, step forward and be
cut off at the knees, be hemmed in,
the mouth of your heart sewn shut
by surge after surge of holes punched
through the skin of your dignity. And all
the shreds of who you might have been
stitched together by mismatching thread
so taut it frays the mind to think about it.
The world is not round, it is angled.
It is not smooth, it elbows through air
and ether like fins slicing waves into sea
glass, wake healing only until the next seam
sears through. The world rewards those
tailored to its pattern, makes them light
their own orange flames that burn
then fade beyond the horizon line basted
in the space between what could be and what is.
Daughter
got herself busted for sassin the cops
more than once then worked it off
with the judges after hours […]
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Baby Buggy Boogie-Woogie
Homage to Piet Mondrian
[…]
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A multi-Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Jennifer Hambrick won the 2020 Stevens Poetry Manuscript Prize of the National Federation of State Poetry Societies for her collection In the High Weeds, won First Place in the 2018 Haiku Society of America Haibun Award Competition, and won the 2020 Sheila-Na-Gig Poetry Prize. Hambrick is featured in former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser’s newspaper and online column, American Life in Poetry; was appointed the inaugural Artist-in-Residence at historic Bryn Du Mansion, Granville, Ohio; and authored the collections Joyride: A Haibun Road Trip (Red Moon Press) and Unscathed (NightBallet Press), nominated for the Ohioana Book Award. Hundreds of her poems appear in The American Journal of Poetry, Chiron Review, the Santa Clara Review, The Main Street Rag, POEM, The San Pedro River Review, Maryland Literary Review, Third Wednesday, Mad River Review, Oyster River Pages, Modern Haiku, The Heron’s Nest, The Haibun Journal, Frogpond, Mayfly, Wales Haiku Journal, Haiku Canada Review, Shamrock: The Journal of the Irish Haiku Society, the major Japanese newspapers The Asahi Shimbun and The Mainichi, and in many other journals and anthologies. A frequent recipient of poetry commissions, Jennifer Hambrick has also received numerous awards and other recognitions for her poetry, including from Tokyo’s NHK World TV, Haiku Poets of Northern California, the Ohio Poetry Association, and others. Also a classical musician and public radio broadcaster and web producer, Jennifer Hambrick is an Ohio Arts Council Teaching Artist in creative writing and lives in Columbus, Ohio. jenniferhambrick.com.
Baby Buggy Boogie-Woogie”, “Daughter”, and “Raw Edge” originally appeared in Third Wednesday, The Main Street Rag, and Gyroscope Review, respectively.
Read More: A brief Q&A with Jennifer Hambrick