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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