False Cedar
Gray light, twilight, darkening and cold.
Redcedars seed, invade farm pastures,
spread limbs over prairie grasses.
But come in close, crush a redcedar berry the color of sky,
inhale the astringent fragrance. Walk beneath redcedar trees,
alley gravel crunching, brush hands through scaled leaves. Sigh,
and it will return the breath, fragranced and robust.
Redcedar, tolerant of sand, rock, clay, drought, and cold:
in fire, flames ladder through its lower branches
to consume the offering in one glorious gulp.
Farmers singe its branches to protect pastures,
each green sheath peeled back and back
until the whole of the tree is orange as flame,
scorched dry, skinned in charcoal.
The waxwings rise on the hot vapors
with redcedar seeds in their bellies,
carrying the tree like a secret egg into another life.
• • •
Waning Crescent
The first moon I breathed was wise,
my new eyes waking for milk that first night
to a sky dark with possibility, my fists
clutching instinctively
to my mother’s dark braids. The clay bowl
of my mouth worked its tongue
into tentative shapes, white petal of a dogwood.
Darkness wrapped like corn silk, the ripening
of my neck, the harvest. I slept.
The shard of light outside my crib
spoke in a shatter, a voice of knowing.
We rose, my limbs and the cat of the moon.
Jupiter sang, and Io, Europa, Ganymede,
Calisto. I came to the world small enough
to hear the moon. The crescent dipped into me like a ladle,
the moon large enough to hold my voice.
Moon that first night was dim,
and that by morning, the only open thing
was my skin, entire, eccentric.
What I felt then, I felt alone, near darkness,
the ground fertile below my nestled body.
• • •
Hannah Marshall lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works at the public library and as the poetry editor for South 85 Journal. Marshall’s poem, “This Is a Love Poem to Trees,” appears in The Best American Poetry 2021. Her poems have also been published in New Ohio Review, Poetry Daily, The South Carolina Review, The American Journal of Poetry, and elsewhere. Her manuscript, The Shape That Good Can Take, was a finalist for the 2021 St. Lawrence Book Award. She received her MFA in creative writing from Converse College.