five poems
by Hanna Webster
Death in a Heat Wave
Spotted lanternfly crawling across my living room floor in candlelight. It’s so beautiful, cherry-red wings peeking behind spotted ones, like an origami ladybug. Windows shut in the creeping summer heatwave.
The spotted lanternfly lays egg masses thirty to fifty eggs each. Spotted lanternflies will cover trees1. Swarm in the air. Decimate crops. Turn vineyards skeletons.
How to reckon with the here-and-now. If I loved him. If he wasn’t my boyfriend. If I daydreamed about it. If I bought him gifts. If I pledged to write him a book, Patti Smith-style. If there was never penetration. If I wrote him letters signed, Always. If my body still reacts during sex like a siren.
I know how they sense impending impact, shoot off sideways to evade. I picture a flood in my bathtub, crawling in my drawers, red on my sheets. Slo-mo of a desiccating grape. Spindly legs gripping the hot metal of a highway car.
The Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture has instructed citizens to kill the spotted lanternfly on sight.
It’s imperative to immediately report it online.
What else? Squash it, smash it. These are called bad bugs for a reason.
I slam my notebook onto the unsuspecting body. Roman candles lit in each corner of the room, I consider sacrifice. What it sloughs.
1 Language throughout has been taken from the Pennsylvania Dept. of Agriculture website: https://www.pa.gov/en/agencies/pda/plants-land-water/spotted-lanternfly/spotted-lanternfly-alert.html#:~:text=If%20you%20see%20a%20spotted,Kill%20it!
Narcissus, Repenting
I lick her palm, which tastes like mercy, her grooved heartline ensnared by the pathetic molecular boundary of her flesh. What a shame. I smell fear radiate from her hair like steam
Her curves, distorted under the bathwater and pink from heat when we sweat, feral and sloshing, metallic wallpaper marred from humidity, I keep my tongue attached to her; from now on, I’ll be gentle, I’ll build her a sanctuary, walled off from the rooms I raged in
From now on, I’ll be open, not only open, faithful! Her sex, the only altar I’ll worship, fingers dug into carpet, spine a blissful arch
I’ll apologize for her bruising, ochre and ash, but I’ll promise it was in jest
I’ll cultivate temperance, I’ll rub her feet with a salve of eucalyptus; and on my knees, I’ll repent in the only way I know how: hovering my lips above her nape
I’ll have stifled something inside myself, a tyrant, poised at a precipice, interminable, self-destruct button lurking under my skin, I tire
of groveling in an empty room
with no applause. I’ll drown
the tyrant. I’ll shatter
my pedestal. For her,
I’ll do it all; I’ll unbury tenderness
tomorrow, I promise.
Rituals of the Future
I.
Humidity glosses our skin slick under a rust sky.
It’s October. Trumpet flowers wilt from heat
watch neighbors latch their splintering doors, yank curtains shut.
I tamp espresso flat into the chrome porta
feel a twinge of nostalgia for winter, when we’d curl
fingers around some hot liquid, fighting
frostbite. I ice the steaming coffee, hands quiver at the crackle
out my kitchen window, watch an orange fall, listless off
its mother branch, soon to blacken in the weeds.
II.
Next day, torrential. My basement floods again. There go
the cardboard boxes stuffed with Halloween decorations. There go
stacks of photos from the before-times: at Mara’s dinner party, buzzed
off gossip and Prosecco. Here’s when you proposed
and dogwood trees shed with excitement at our union
not yet sloughed from drought.
III.
Waltz in the wreckage, pretend
this is temporary. Must rescue the neighbors
from their island of a roof. Drag the kayak out the attic.
IV.
Want to die
on my couch in that lace dress
fever colonizing the mortal cavern
of me, convalescent and blazing
one last smoke signal, to peter out
as a whimper, unfeeling through this whole ordeal.
attachment theory
Thomas dove off the boat’s edge, surfaced
with vertebrae intact. I drove eight hours
to Kentucky alone and didn’t never wake up. or
wake up in the road. I slept in a wooded cabin,
no intruders stirred me. Zero brown recluse
spiders welted my anaphylactic body.
Rachel ate a red berry off the trail. She bitter-twisted
her face but did not collapse. I climbed
into a boat with a stranger. He returned me
to the shore twenty minutes later. The cave
he said to visit existed. The cave, a highlight
of the trip. We escaped the cave.
Like exposure therapy. Like the ophidiophobe
who palms a garter snake,
I learn love, seeing her car headlights
return each night to the driveway.
I’m so glad I stuck around for this,
this hurling my body off a lake dock into too-cold water, toes kissing sand not stones; this peeling each darkening cherry with my lips & teeth, carving around the pit, by the pool, breath-holding for the emerging sun so I can dive back in; this waking two minutes before my alarm, learning the clockwork as magic, as appearing act; this wearing-the-Gunne-Sax-dress to the farmer’s market & buying arugula & thinking to gift them lavender honey & muscle salve & following through. They’re wearing the earrings you gave them when you thought it was too soon for gifts. They hooked them in right out of the box, see? You didn’t think it could be easy. Curled up as a shameful ending against the oven, eyeing the dials of the gas stove, unrelenting in your grief, you didn’t know the days would still lengthen in the summer. Your toes almost froze then, & he was lurking around each corner in a city he’s never visited. It’s July now, & you’re waking early & moving your body & pulverizing fruit by the river with your warm, warm hands. On the phone, when everything was dead outside, Nate said, “One day you won’t want a goddamned thing from him,” & you thought he was lying. You thought, “I must be farther down this well than he ever was.” But you’ve tucked yourself into bed before midnight, & you’re reading a new book, & when Jane Wong wrote that sometimes she needs a reminder that she’s easy to love, you cried before sleeping deep; you missed their goodnight text & that was okay, & in the morning, you pasted it all over your mirror: “You are easy to love.” You are seeing proof of this.
Photo of Hanna Webster
BIO: Hanna Webster is an award-winning journalist, poet, and photographer with an M.A. from Johns Hopkins University. Her literary work and art have appeared in Stonecoast Review, ONE ART, Bellingham Review, HAD, Epiphany, and elsewhere. Webster is the current poetry editor for The Science Writer, and her chapbook, “I’m So Glad I Stuck Around for This,” was a semifinalist for the 2024 YesYes Books Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.