Archive
Matters
As in, material.
Plural.
Enigmatic content
of brains,
unlit outer space.
As in,
this is significant,
weighty.
Sudden certainty,
meaning
placed, pointed to.
As in,
to be taken into one’s
own hands,
owned, held within
my grasp,
a cupped moth still
flying.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, and instructor. Her poems have appeared in places such as Contrary, MAYDAY, and The Nervous Breakdown. She is a poetry blogger for the Huffington Post, and is the founder of Paging Columbus!, a literary arts event series in Central Ohio. You can visit her online at The Storialist, where she posts poems, art, and thoughts on creativity.
You Are Here to Receive This Prophecy
You are here to receive this prophecy,
I am so certain of this I would wager life on it.
Get open, fast. Get to the highest point
available, that hill, for example. Even better,
the tree on top of the hill. Clamber up,
go on. Do what the branches do, reach up,
tilt your face to the clouds. Now you wait.
Prepare to hear. You never know what the voice
will sound like, perhaps not a voice. Maybe
like a current of electricity sizzling, sparking,
or the snap of knuckles cracking. A slide whistle
or kazoo—don’t laugh, it could happen.
How would that look, God talking to you,
you laughing it up in a tree on a hilltop.
Be a lightning rod, an antenna. Reception
can be active, you know. Think of a dancer
being lifted, all her muscles tightening
around her bones. She is lighter for how she
lifts herself, gets smaller, more powerful.
Call the message to you, show you can
be trusted to hear and hold it. Don’t even think
of coming down from there, you just wait.
You stay up in that tree, listening. The words
will come to you, they will, they will.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, instructor, and singer-songwriter based in Columbus, Ohio. Her writing has been featured (or is forthcoming) in various online and print publications, including the Huffington Post, The Nervous Breakdown, MAYDAY, Stymie, and Escape into Life. For more of her work, visit her daily poetry site, The Storialist, at thestorialist.com.
Code
written and performed by Hannah Stephenson
(lyrics)
You finally figured out
what was off;
you wrote it down.
Messages on post-it notes,
They try to stick.
They cling and grope.
You try to line them up,
balance words like building blocks.
Calm it down, a seesaw to a house.
What are you saying to yourself?
You keep inflating all the vowels.
We assign a picture to a thing,
and tie them with a string.
They bash into everything.
Can you recognize
these feeble forms
you work to write?
Like a signal from a boat,
you blink a light;
it’s all in code.
This map needs a key,
someone good at interpreting.
Calm it down, a seesaw to a house.
What are you saying to yourself?
Please stop covering your mouth.
We assign a picture to a thing,
and tie them with a string.
They drip onto everything.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, writer, and instructor living in Columbus, Ohio. Her poems have appeared in ouroboros review, Mankind Magazine, Spoonful, The Birmingham Arts Journal, and Artsy!Dartsy!. You can visit her daily poetry blog, The Storialist, at www.thestorialist.com and hear more of her music at www.soundcloud.com/thestorialist.
The Station
In all of this turning, the station remains still,
stationary. The stairwells and platforms are teeming
with bodies. These people are projectionists,
time travelers. Their minds beam forth
like the steady light cast from miner’s helmets
into the future: thirty minutes, an hour,
three hours, twelve. Busy human shells
flood the turnstiles, spin the metal racks
volunteering magazines, brochures,
postcards, correspondence. Autopilot
propels each person to a destination.
bodies arrive into humming, taupe offices,
fall into slate blue pneumatic office chairs
and find their minds already sorting inboxes.
What a relief, to sit alone and spin
in the privacy of ergonomic bliss.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, writer, and instructor living in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in ouroboros review, Mankind Magazine, Spoonful, The Birmingham Arts Journal, and Artsy!Dartsy!. You can visit her daily poetry blog, The Storialist, at www.thestorialist.com.
Building Our Houses Closer Together
High-rise apartments are fully occupied,
twenty-nine floors of twenty-two residences each.
The numbers beg to be multiplied, to yield
a reassuring statistic. Six hundred and thirty-eight
microcosms stacked, framed behind drywall
and glass. A pillar of that many lives
only reassures us of our littleness,
and perhaps the unspoken wish
to be on top of one another,
sharing daily commotion in noises
that trickle down the barber pole
of neighbors: the thud of shut cabinets,
the high-pitched trill of a shower head,
an alarm clock’s beep signaling that
like you, out there in the morning dark,
someone else has just awakened.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, writer, and instructor living in Los Angeles. Her poems have appeared in ouroboros review, Mankind Magazine, Spoonful, The Birmingham Arts Journal, and Artsy!Dartsy!. You can visit her daily poetry blog, The Storialist, at www.thestorialist.com.
qarrtsiluni 