Hello

a poem

January 14, 2021 issue

hello to the unimaginative and dim ways of my kin, hello

to the bad lot we are, to the women mean and plucked, and to the men

on the broken steps who beat down the roses with their hosings,

to the nights that rose black as an inked plate, into which an acid bit stars—

puckered, tight, hard, pale as a surgeon’s scars,

hello to all that vast, unconditional bad luck, to the sensible, the stuffy,

the ugly couture of the thrifty, to the limp of bad goods, of old

furniture, the repeated wince of the creaky rocker, and to the grandmothers

dying in its clutch, and hello to rage which like an axis can move the world.

Lynn Emanuel’s most recent collection, The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected, won the Lenore Marshall Award from the Academy of American Poets. Her forthcoming collection is Transcript of the Disappearance, Exact and Diminishing. (January 2021)

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