Back to Issue Thirty-One

In Theory

BY G. HANLON

I like lipstick in theory
and the names

of lipsticks, especially Cherries
in the Snow.

I say her name over
and over, the way we wrote

our names as girls
sealing ourselves in serifs.

One of these days I expect
to come home and find you

doing coke in a sparkly shirt
she says. This doesn’t

seem like the sort of life
you’d be leading.

She’s a little
out of season.

I pray the rosary
of her spine irreverently.

The shadows of snowflakes
flickering like dark birds

over the torn up pages
of the white sheets

wanting to break
into beauty like a ripe

pomegranate
as it multiplies in jewels.

 

 

G. Hanlon‘s poetry has appeared in Kenyon Review, Ploughshares, Cincinnati Review, CutbankOnline, Iowa Review, New Letters, SIFT (a chapbook), and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the Iowa Review Award (2013), a semi-finalist for the Tomaz Salamun Prize at VERSE (2015), Top 25 for Glimmer Train’s Short Story Prize for New Writers (2017), Top Ten in Poetry for CutBank’s Patricia Goedicke Prize (2017), and semi-finalist in OSU’s The Journal Wheeler Prize (2018), among others.

Next (Mark Halliday) >

< Previous (Chloe Honum)