Poetry Suite by Hollie Hefferman
“When the world is on paper, I’m in love with everywhere.”
Poetry by Hollie Hefferman
+++
The Distance at Which I Keep My Heart
My father is driving me to live
a thousand miles away from his carcinoma
and weight loss. We study the swollen sky
and chew our nails as the towns tick by:
Reliance, Salt Lake, Coalville –
each name an iron cast on the cruel distance
we are creating. In early summer
we drank and held hands until we cried,
death a small shadow in our palms.
Now, we eat shitty pizza in a parlor
by our hotel, the slide of pint glasses low
and thick on the table. We're so tough,
my dad and I. We can break hearts
without looking. Outside the soundless sky
is shutting down. We walk back to the room
as dark strangers and wait for the other
to open the door, to turn on the light.
+ + +
Thirst
I check my eyes in the rearview mirror:
a lost animal blinks back at me.
She hasn't had a drink in three days. Blood flecks
her sheets when she coughs. Maybe we should go
to the ER. I might be better tomorrow,
she tells me, after I eat some toast.
My eyes stagger over her face.
Outside the bone sky deepens to gold.
I think about her dying, and a sigh shakes out
of my chest. She counts the coins in the cup
holder, imagines bourbon poured into her throat,
the sweet burn of it. It will get easier if she can wait
another day. And she clutches my hand
because it's her hand, slips the key into the ignition
and looks over our shoulder as we shift
the car, and slip into reverse.
+ + +
How to Tell a True War Story
My father is a young father, his little boy
is listening to a story about bears, maybe,
or mice, my mother's voice soft in the dim
room, as my father aims his weapon
over the open door of his patrol car
at the head of a man holding a woman
hostage in a corner store parking lot.
A civilian officer now, the jungle behind
him for years, its faceless deaths remain
faceless, but the eyes of this man latch
themselves to my father's. They both
have a finger on a trigger, and in
my father's head he's already telling this story,
and in it he's not scared. And maybe
this woman has a son, he's waiting
for her now, it's bedtime, and the man yanks
her chin to the side with one hand and presses
the barrel to her temple with the other, he wants
the police to see the bullet's entry, it is the story
he wants to tell. There is a version that ends
with the woman going home to her kid,
the man walking away empty handed,
a version that ends with everyone alive.
But the story is that my dad shot a man
in the face, came home and pulled
his son's books from the shelves,
and quietly moved his lips around the words,
his tears dampening the pictures
of the friendly animals.
+ + +
The Blue Interior
The vein of highway on the map is the color of blood
when it hides under skin. Country flayed open
on the table, hands pressing the creases
as if they can stretch the world thin, the harness of life
in two dimensions. Crooked thread of canyon road,
bleak flatlands and dash of dry lake bed, tiny curls of cape
along the coast – where was this heart born?
Near the center, where the grasses are made of gold cells
among the strict grid of small towns;
the city, and its geography of brick and purpose,
the streets of arteries and capillaries,
a substitute for the human condition;
or the isolated forest green, where the rivers pipe
themselves from the earth, the liquid organ
of clear, sweet music?
When the world is on paper, I'm in love with everywhere.
The map says: you are here. You're home.
You will be born again wherever you are breathing.
+ + +
Bird Poem
A drop of sun falls before me: a yellow
bird slumps to the sidewalk, the black-tipped wings
formal and folded. It stares at the sky,
beak sprung open, a short gasp of death
tucked in the red throat, the bright, quick pulses
of its last breaths. The eyes freeze, the light left
in them a reflection of city clouds and sharp windows.
I stand over the bird and its beauty, a trophy
of nature, these dead feathers at my feet. The newspaper
in my hands unfolds itself and I wrap the brilliant body,
a package of gold held loose in my palms.
Little fugitive, who escaped from a world of song
and light, who stared down the sun as it died:
you are a temporary treasure to the living,
the trove of death the trough in your beak,
the lightness of life the air in your bones.
+ + +
Header image courtesy of Hyuro. To view a gallery of her street art, go here.
Hollie Hefferman grew up in Wyoming and relocated to Portland in 2001. A recent graduate of Pacific University's MFA in Poetry, she currently studies prose with Dangerous Writers, apprentices in a Traditional Chinese Medicine program, and drives a cab.