Held

Issue 8.2 | Hannah Perrin King

Hannah Perrin King grew up on a dirt road and now lives in Brooklyn, NY where she writes about god and horses. She received honorable mention in The Cincinnati Review’s Robert and Adele Schiff Awards in Poetry and Prose and was a 2017 Tin House Summer Workshops Scholar. This May, she completed her MFA at The New School and is currently an affiliate editor at The Alaska Quarterly Review. She is the winner of AWP’s 2018 Kurt Brown Prize for Poetry.

Before language, there were hands. To receive, deliver. This I know—the holding

of things, the releasing. How with fingertips he fed the ashes of my letters 

to the star magnolia’s shadow. How, into the ivied blue of his palms, 

I placed my gifts: 17 ammonites, the skull of a deer, sometimes 

my own jaw. The mouth silenced by drink, thirst 

predating the word for it. Burning, 

my letters. Long before

I wrote them,  

long before

I handed him the match

though, long ago—as though eavesdropping 

on a story I’d forgotten is my own—on a street corner

in Laos a local boy on a bicycle and I, on foot, collide

& in the dark street, in a dark silk of shock—of inertia 

inverted—we hold each other, fingers laced, as we

in English ask, are you okay, are you until we begin again 

to feel like strangers        with two languages.