Squaretable Seminars

Twenty Years Ago,
My Father Was Buried On a Board


On a hill in the country, a rolling cemetery sits
in place of a field. Summer grasses cradle one mound
where a lone star sinks down with each rain. There, six feet beneath,
green diamonds are pieced together in patterned fabric. The tiny dots and dashes,
evenly marked for scissors and needle, are gone; but a thread weaves in between, marking time and holding
the universe together. Eight sharp points star the white ground, where a man’s bones face west to watch the fading daylight wash over the corn.


© Hannah Walleser

At a Zero-Tolerance School


on the whiteboard
of the boy’s varsity locker room
a death threat
is written.

The police are called, and some football player
and his sidekick own up to it.

The message is erased.

Here,
when something is wrong,
the star player still starts.

Here,
when a student changes schools,
or drops out of classes,
or hangs himself,

no one can seem to figure out
the reason why.


© Hannah Walleser

Sometimes I scratch my head,
but then I realize that there is a certain blindness
rampant in the process of finding.
And I concede to the fact that only crazies
attempt the unreasonable and come up with results.

Other times I tap my fingers as if
a string of beings will parade up out of the depths
of the reservoir of my repertoire.
And I think there is no way to reach
even the most possible of impossibilities.

But it’s the times that I disappear,
whirling among the dust particles by the window,
that I realize I’ve manifested the very thing
I thought I had only dreamed.
I had only forgotten how to see.


© Hannah Walleser

Cobbled stones line the city, slick in the streets,
Dry stone walls stacked simply around the fields,
Grey blue rain drizzles down,
. And the land floods.

Pubs carve into buildings like twisted caverns,
A permanent green soaked into the land,
Lakes rise in the wake of fields in the hills,
. And the rivers gorge.

Irish in the supermarket and doubled on signs,
Clam chowder eaten with thick brown bread,
Fog swallows the isle’s west islands,
. And the road
. That has never flooded
. Floods.


© Hannah Walleser

The six-year-old boy
in the silver
balloon floated fifty
miles away.
Hours later when it
reached the ground,
people rejoiced.
I want my fifteen
minutes of fame.


© Hannah Walleser