if you say,
“I told her
everything”

“everything”
stands in for
“nothing”

to your listener
or, even to her
you tell “everything”

there are things
you left out
you did not say

everything
like everything
wants to be told

here is a thing
that if not everything
is also not

no-thing:
round burrs grow
low in the woods

my small hands fill
with them like
blackberries

foxberries,
dewberries, wild
strawberries

some snag
on my pink gingham
pinafore

burr-treasure, burr
blocks,
a burr for every

minute
becomes a kind
of clock

stacked up, each
on each, they
hook-and-eye

each other, become
a burr crown
the same color

as my hair
and I
place them there

parade out the woods
to my mother
and her friends

 

 

 

Hannah VanderHart lives in Durham, NC. She has her MFA from George Mason University, and is currently at Duke University writing her dissertation on gender and collaboration poetics in the seventeenth century. She has poems and reviews recently published and forthcoming at The McNeese Review, Up the Staircase Quarterly, Unbroken Journal, Thrush, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and The Greensboro Review. More at: hannahvanderhart.com

 

 

 

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