Tag: Hayden Saunier

Human Interest Story by Hayden Saunier

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Human Interest Story

Always the final bit on the newscast,
a tiny Tinkerbell-sized light
lifted from the dank bottom
of the jam-packed Pandora’s Box
of horrors just unleashed at us
with shrieking chyron banners
and pop-up advertisements
for which heinous true crime story
or CSI procedural is coming up,
but for 30 seconds we see puppies
rescued from a storm drain,
a wedding ring returned
to a war bride after fifty years
lost in a Nebraska cornfield,
and last night, a man with one arm
paralyzed was offered a simple loop
to bind his dead arm to his working one
in such a way that he could now
raise both arms above his head
in a ballerina’s O, lift them over
his young son’s body to hug him
back, and I can’t stop seeing
the looks on both their faces, lit
so brightly from within, it’s hauled me
through this whole next day on hope.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensanier.com @Hayden_Saunier

Three Poems by Hayden Saunier

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Song for a Suburban Mid-Life Crisis

Four bedrooms, two baths.
Out front, a weeping cherry tree

and underneath each sink, a panoply
of poisons scented to the fantasy

of spotless linen hanging
sundried in an ocean breeze.

Don’t get me wrong,
I live here too.

When I stand before an oval mirror
pulling tight the skin

above my ears to give myself
a temporary facelift,

I watch my mouth lose
years of disappointment—

even though I can’t remember
what it was I wanted.

*

Weeding After an Argument

Neither of us
talking.

Instead, we grip
living things

by their crowns,
rip their roots

satisfyingly
out of the ground.

*

These Mornings When

I’ve dreamed so much
my whole heart beats
against the drumskin
of my body as though
a makeshift jazz
band has been jamming
all night long inside me
and the tenor sax and bass
have only just now
tucked their instruments
into the crushed velvet
insides of hard cases
and are riding the trains
home, tired, happy,
imaginary money
jingling in their pockets,
while the percussionist
taps out the last hi-hat
vibrations of a dream
into the turning world,
filling it with that buzz
of having played well
all night, for each other,
even when there was no one
to listen, no one to applaud,
no one to throw a single
shiny coin into the hat.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensanier.com @Hayden_Saunier

Ghazal for Summer Squash by Hayden Saunier

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Ghazal for Summer Squash

At the end of every farm lane, driveway, garden gate
is a basket, bag, or pilfered milk crate labeled “free,” filled with zucchini.

Loanwords are words adopted from one language and incorporated,
sans translation, into another: such as ghazal, stanza, sans, and yes, zucchini.

More potassium than a banana and packing only 25 calories makes
this charmer a nutritional powerhouse, says the PR lady for zucchini.

Julia Child served a dish called Tian de Courgettes au Riz,
composed of cheese, rice, too much work: it’s almost all zucchini.

The female flower forms a yellow trumpet; the male’s a thinner,
slightly duller bloom. Add a bee and presto! More zucchini.

One is a zucchina. But there’s never only one. A synonym
for surplus, surfeit, excess, glut, or way-too-much should be zucchini.

When possible, choose baby, small or barely medium, because
size matters when discussing gourds (and that goes double for zucchini.)

Shaved, dressed with garlic, panko, reindeer hearts or baco-bits,
then blackened, sauteed, pureed, whipped to foam: it’s still zucchini.

Praise song for gardens, blossom, vines, and plenty, I offer thanks
for frost and final stanzas, for an end to this zucchini of zucchini.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry; her most recent is A Cartography of Home (Terrapin: 2021). Her work has been published in 32 Poems, Beloit Poetry Journal, Bracken, Pedestal, Thrush, and Virginia Quarterly Review, featured on The Writers Almanac, Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize and the Rattle Poetry Prize, among others. She is the founder/director of the interactive poetry reading, No River Twice. www.haydensaunier.com @Hayden_Saunier

This Late Thanks by Hayden Saunier

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This Late Thanks

Hickory nuts shake down from shagbarks
onto blacktop, their leather cases cracked

at the seams, releasing the dense center
that as a child, I’d try to bust open

for food with a hammer against stone.
It never worked out. My first careful blows

revealed an intricate chambered hardness
that clenched the meat too tightly for my fingers

to pick out so I’d bring the hammer down
hard as Thor, which smashed the halves to mush

shot through with broken shell, impossible
to eat. Sometimes, even a truck can’t bust

a hickory nut’s core. Today, they drop
and settle atop asphalt, or skitter

into ditches to soften and take root,
get storm-washed into creeks to rot, decay,

go round again. For years, I thought that if
I really tried, I could discover where

the sweet spot lives between slow patient time
and swift obliteration— the perfect

angle, words, or pressure point to crack,
precisely to the right degree, the small

hard architectures held so tight inside—
but no such place. Instead, I have this late

and quiet thanks for fate or happenstance
or maybe even grace, that any one of us

has fallen, broken just enough,
onto an earth, or into hands, that give.

*

Hayden Saunier is the author of five books of poetry, including A Cartography of Home, published in 2021. Awards include the Pablo Neruda Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, Keystone Prize, and a dozen Pushcart Prize nominations. She directs No River Twice (poetry + improvisation), an interactive, audience-driven poetry reading/performance. More at http://www.haydensaunier.com.

Lunacy by Hayden Saunier

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Lunacy

I fight a stuck window above
the bathtub on April’s first mild evening
after long enduring cold by banging hard
on rails that held tight all winter
with fists that held tight too.
As if this weather-spattered sash
were a rusted prison door that lifted
into madly temperate spring.
Turns out, it is. The window gives.
Allows a quarter moon trailing
its gauzy negligee of light
to float with me in warm water
as a congress of tree frogs no bigger
than buttons sings to the world born
of rain in the ditches to open
its hands, begin over again.

*

Hayden Saunier’s newest book of poetry, A Cartography of Home, was just published by Terrapin. Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, Rattle Poetry Prize, Gell Poetry Award, Keystone Prize, has been published in journals such as VQR, Beloit Poetry Review, Thrush, 32 Poems, Tar River Poetry, online at Poetry Daily, Verse Daily and read numerous times by Garrison Keillor for The Writer’s Almanac. She is an actor and is founder and director of No River Twice (poetry + improvisation) an interactive, audience driven poetry reading/performance. More at www.haydensaunier.com.