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.