New Grace Hill Cemetery
Birmingham, AL
since abandoning my tin can tongue
I’ve started fetishizing nature
—even the paper wasps sing a vibrating thrum
under alabama’s heat lamp
thick mulberry sap drips & blackens the soil
where ants cleave sugar molecules
& go about the business of creation
among desecrated graves
grow three perfect puffball mushrooms
which when fried in butter
taste precisely like pancakes
artificial disruption
with a neighboring fence turned museum :
a gravesite activist calling his mourning flock
to virtue
under careful magnification
we all look the same—
clusters of cells atop cells
here I identity a plant
no different from any other plant
abacus & parchment & filigree
here in the dendrites
I find all the languages on earth
sequestered in one microscopic neuron
& lodge them in my throat like glass
Rices Hill Cemetery
Northport, AL
lines of headstones face away from the road
edging up a hill until they reach
& scatter beyond a privet barrier
decades younger than the youngest dead
at the bottom of the hill : a road
on the other side of the road : a concreterie
slow industrial coughing
tractors & bulldozers & the ongoing reversal
blaring of three trucks
graves disappear into the trees
leaving behind sparklingplasticchristmasflowers
glitterdousedpoinsettas ribbonedhollybranches
amid abandonedcigarettes
& a stuffedcartooncatmissinganarm
a brick holds down a pair of plasticsunflowers
crushing them into a concrete slab a 91-
year-old woman buried 30 years ago
another weight another weight
she married a freemason
who held his secrets like fresh eggs
& now beneath the earth she holds herself
all miraculous & real
Hannah V Warren, originally from Mississippi, is a poet, translator, literary critic, and Fulbright Scholar living in Birmingham, AL, and soon to live in Gambier, OH, as the Kenyon Review Fellow. Along with authoring the poetry collection Slaughterhouse for Old Wives’ Tales (2024) and two chapbooks, she was awarded a PEN/Heim Translation Grant for her work with German poetry. Her writing has appeared in Gulf Coast, Passages North, and Denver Quarterly, among others. Warren has a PhD in literature from the University of Georgia and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Kansas.