Letter to My Red Gun-Dog America
all you said was good cooking beautiful all you ate
the beans shaped like pearls & the pineapple sliced
half-frozen & the egg yolks you touched
with the firm moonscape of your bread
you were in this town in the rain, in the funeral
sense of the town, & wore your only
black suit, its gathers & tucks & hemming
some new cloth to wrap your heart in, to hold
the ichor & iron of your bones
& the cars came like crows, gathering speed
falling over themselves in the road
to get to the meat
to get to the kill
Hannah Craig lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She is the author of This History that Just Happened (Parlor Press, 2017). Her work has recently appeared in journals like the Mid-American Review, North American Review, and Copper Nickel. She was the winner of the 2015 New Measure Poetry Prize and the 2016 Mississippi Review Poetry Prize.