Tag Archives: Hannah Fuller

Things My Mother and I Don’t Talk About

Mother taught me to linger in doorways.

Assess intent. Always sleep with one eye open.

Suffer immensely.

I wonder if she knows how long I’ve carried this. I still do.

Sleep evades me. There’s a guillotine under my eyelids instead.

Are we so obsessed with messy hearts?

Spilling pink matter onto paper,

onto sidewalks,

onto oncoming passerby.

Who decides when we’ve endured enough?

Cosmic fingertips plucking us up by

shirt collars. We are covered in shards of glass

that we’ve renamed Love.

Mother taught me to be inconspicuous and

calculating both.

To give my heart but never said to whom.

She bleeds pink. I stay awake.

Hannah Fuller is a graduate student at SUNY Brockport pursuing a career in school counseling. She has been published in Gandy Dancer, Third Wednesday, and Polemical Zine.

Aquarius

I read your palms in my dreams. Your hands are soft. They rest in mine like a bird on a branch. Temporary. Ready to take off. The lines are deep. The heart line is straight. I think this means you don’t love me. I think this means that you never can.

I do not ask the time that you were born. I know you were born in February and that is mostly enough for me. The cold months make the most independent babies. I think it’s something to do with survival. Maybe Uranus and her radical change. Calves, shins, ankles. I think you’d laugh at me asking either way.

I wonder if you care what my palms look like. How the sky looked when I was born. If my hands are steady or shaky. I think this means I’m in love with you. I think this means I always will be.

I wake up to the sound of you shifting—moving farther into the distance.

Hannah Fuller is a graduate student at SUNY Brockport pursuing a career in school counseling. She has been published in Gandy Dancer, Third Wednesday, and Polemical Zine.

CAN YOU LOVE THE SAME ON THE MOON?

you asked me to write you a poem. one where

it doesn’t hurt to read. you tell me too often i write

with grief as the main character. sadness and loss

as the supporting roles. you say my metaphor of love

as a gaping flesh wound is so unfair. we kiss. i write

you a poem. one where we end up together and

live out our forever on the moon. where there is

no fear, no grief, no oozing wound. where there is

a weightlessness. like how you hold my heart so it

doesn’t feel as heavy. like how a peach melts in

the sun and dribbles sickly sweet. i almost accept

this idea of love. almost move to the moon with you

and bounce around from crater to crater, knowing it

was never about the hurt; it was about the release.

until you leave. and my heart comes down with a

resounding thud and opens up, spilling black into

my chest. grief comes in and cleans the mess. i write

another poem. one where the moon doesn’t exist.

Hannah Fuller is a sophomore English (literature) and psychology major. When she’s not furiously scribbling away, she enjoys hiking and baking.