
HAIR
A tree will catch a snapped twig in the
fork of a healthy branch, god forbid it
reach the earth. The twig will balance
there for seasons. It is the same with
me, in the shower, with—what unit? a
handful?—a violence of curls, several
ounces of dull hair in my fists (horror
of lifting one’s own limb, horror of
autonomous weight). I do a terrible
math: what fraction of the whole? A
strand on the tweed coat of a lover
is romantic. I am not talking about
that, nor the common imposition
of a choked drain. I am telling you
about the tree that collects its ejected
parts, the tree that postures for
passersby a crooked kind of flowering.
This selection comes from the book, We Ran Rapturous, available from The Atlas Review. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Natalie Giarratano.
Shannon Sankey is the author of We Ran Rapturous (The Atlas Review, forthcoming 2019). Her poems have appeared at Poets.org, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, the minnesota review, Puerto del Sol, Sugar House Review, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a 2017 Academy of American Poets Prize and a 2019 SAFTA residency. She holds an MFA from Chatham University, where she was the Whitford Fellow. She is the founder of Stranded Oak Press. www.shannonsankey.com / @shansankey
Natalie Giarratano is the author of Big Thicket Blues (Sundress Publications, 2017) and Leaving Clean, winner of the 2013 Liam Rector First Book Prize in Poetry (Briery Creek Press, 2013). Her poems have appeared in Beltway Poetry, Tupelo Quarterly, Tinderbox, and American Literary Review, among others. She edits and lives in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her partner and daughter and is the city’s poet laureate. Twitter handle is @shansankey