And Again the Magnolia

Hajara Quinn

Hajara Quinn lives in Portland OR. She is an assistant editor for Octopus Books, Program Director at the IPRC, and the author of the chapbook Unnaysayer (Flying Object 2013). Her poems have appeared in Gulf Coast, The Volta and Sixth Finch, and she is the recipient of a 2015 Oregon Literary Fellowship. 

In the year of the horse

my experience of your 

silence grows

more ornate. 

It fills a silo with broken 

satellite dishes,

a hung-up feeling.

The magnolia posted 

up outside my door

is going bottoms up—

it flies in the face of your

absence, flaunts it.

Tonight the wind is my pep 

rally, knocking the highest 

blooms from their high 

horses, overturning the lawn 

chairs, push brooming a can 

down the street. And again 

the stupid magnolia goes 

stupidly showboating

into the stupid night.