‘Ars Amatoria’, ‘Sweet Potato’ & ‘Remaining’

Hannah Thomas Reyes is an hispanic artist from the Rio Grande valley. As a young child, she was inspired by the workings of the horror genre and the unconventional. Now as an artist, she wants to share her love for those genres, and wants to put her spin on it.

Ars Amatoria
—golden shovel after Kobayashi Issa

You may find it easier, as the others have, to fall in
love with how I make you feel than with me: this
full-lipped, ill-equipped poet headlong whirled
into the wake your smile left. You may even
find endearing the exodus of variegated butterflies
fleeing my stomach to flirt, emetically mustered
to flutter from my curl-framed face. I’ve learned
to swallow the swarm & to forgive their garish ascent; they’re
just yearning to be perceived, in all their hues, and still kept.

Sweet Potato

“One would think of a boy laying
syllables with his tongue

onto a woman’s skin: those are lines
sewn entirely of silence.” -Ilya Kaminsky

If your neck was an elegy, it was for
me. Writing toward your mouth
with the kisses that dragged us
that much closer to a place
further than sleep from our
reach. When your cheeks burnt
stories into my lips & your tears
soothed their cracks, it happened.
Once or twice in his time, a boy is
diced like a sweet potato. Coaxed
from his peel and softened, then
reduced in moments to what sweet
little he built from his roots. What’s
left makes men and poets. You once
told me you’d never love a poet but
only knew you loved me after reading
about the color of your eyes.
You don’t know yourself yet, or where
to look, the next pages all blotted
with uncertainty. I wrote them on your
forehead every morning with a ks;
in forgotten murmurs you would ask
how I can’t fathom your love
when it is here, driving the sun to rise.

Remaining

I am here under hollow skies
when September finds the city,

reading rondeaux at empty tables
to silent applause, candid in its pity.

Stubborn sunshine reminds me: to be
invisible is not to be unexposed,

and how to wake up. I am here
with ears undocked, airs discomposed,

writing answers to what absence asks
when I listen. I am drawn here

by the reassurance of being seen through;
better undistinguished than unclear.

Summer finds me in the doorway, sees
how comfortable I have gotten making

monsters of myself. I am heard by
dripping sunbeams, fall my awaking.

Julian Kanagy is a Chicago-based poet whose work sets out to explore questions he can't find the words to ask. As Editor-in-Chief of The Wild Umbrella, in regular reading, and in his own writing process, Julian appreciates intention, concision, and variety in structure. Per the advice of a mentor, he lives in search of poems that nobody else could have written.