Squaretable Seminars

A mother robin gathered grass
And stuffed it into the vent
Of the newer bathroom.
She must have found it cozy
So laid her eggs there.
We taped the fan switch to “off”
So none of us could
Accidentally
Flip it on and find ourselves
Covered in bloody baby robin down.
But they couldn’t stay there.

We climbed a ladder
And with a gloved hand
Reached in and pulled out
The squawking babies
One by one
And flung them
To the sidewalk below.
If the mother was there
She made no sign of protest.
Not one of the four died
On impact.

We took a shovel,
Tried to clunk one on the head,
Tried to slit another’s throat,
As they chirped
And flapped weak wings
And wriggled.
So we scraped them up
On the metal arm
And plopped them in the cornfield
To die or be eaten.


© Hannah Walleser

Our place is covered in dust:
. chalky grey,
. peach,
. and mauve.
We stand on land compacted:
. brown and powdery,
. that crumbles and sticks
. like ash to the eyes.
We cannot shake this pale veil
. fallen like a shadow
. over the sun.
And that bright shining globe
. is the Vatican.
You might want to come
. visit before
. we’ve disappeared.


© Hannah Walleser

Today I performed my first improv slam poem. Talk about nerve-racking. My word to work in was prank. Yeah, that's what I thought when I read it. w.t.f. can I do with this?

So I titled my poem something like Forfeit This: a 5th Grade Poem Revised in reference to things in class. There is no way I can paraphrase what came out of my brain/mouth next though. I said my ballroom dance class is a metaphor for my life and went with it. Soooooo difficult to get up and improv a poem with 30 seconds of preparation. Damn.

I cannot stand
you street-corner, main-door,
elevator, quad-center,
sidewalk-junction,
come-hear-my-function
preachers. I applaud
your drive to enliven
a crowd with your messages,
your guts to light fire under
butts and say what’s what.
But your words are falling
on deaf ears because
what you’re touting
sounds like bullshit spouting
from a broken fountain
of better-luck-next-time
prime rib ad-lib
that ain’t going nowhere fast.
I have places to go,
people to meet,
and a whole lot of my own
speeches incomplete
because I decided that
undivided attention
goes nowhere if you don’t
have a plan of action.

Please…
Stop complaining…

I have better things to do
than listen to you whine
about your god and his glory
in some grandiose
adventure story
that’s really about intolerance
and inequality,
and an allegiance
to cover your ass
when you decide to kill
en masse and bloody
the grass of history.
I am not too keen
on the scene of
give-me-some-money-and-
we’ll-pray-for-you-honey
miracles or the shade betrayal
of friends because
they don’t call their god
by your god’s name,
god forbid
your religion
be the one to blame.

Please…
Stop complaining…

I have better things to do
than listen to you whine
about two people
loving and giving
and sharing and living
and supporting each other,
being all wrong and against
the order of life
because they’re homo
and not hetero
in the scheme you deem
the be-all end-all
of humanity.
I’d claim insanity
if I were you
because the vanity
of your vision proves
you’re sitting
too close to the mirror
to see the love
that deigns to shove
against your melting block
of ice age idea.

Please…
Stop complaining…

I have better things to do
than listen to you whine
about a woman deciding
what’s best for her
without stopping to confer
with your delusional thoughts
of grandeur.
I refuse to let you choose
to imprison her
in three-fourths a year
of non-volunteer incubation,
no kind of foundation
to base the creation
of a life-supporting society,
until the day
you curb the perturbance
of sperm-donating oops!-ters
who with agility
shrug the responsibility
of this fertility,
and find a route
for men to bear the doubt
of carrying this thing out.

Please…
Stop complaining...

So you’ve established your
place in the world,
but your world is not
our world and I want to
-knock, knock, knock-
welcome you
to the real world.
Excuse me
for not standing up in ovation
because your statements
don’t hold up in the line-up
of listenable material
worthy of admiration.
I am not sorry
for my lack of interest
in listening to you
try to explain that 2 plus 2
does not equal five,
because it actually does
when you synergize,
so excuse you and your talk
and your self-righteous walk,
but I have things to do.


© Hannah Walleser

Good and Evil were at recess, so while Justice
was eating lunch at the corner café,
I picked up her blindfold from the jury box
and tightened its objectivity about my eyes.

I held her double-edged sword in my right hand,
dangled the chain of scales from my left,
and stepped into the regal pose of the law
I had seen her take on many an occasion.

How embarrassing her complacent gaze
when the blindfold fell off,
the way the scales clanged to the floor
and the sword razed my calf
filling my nostrils with the red sting of iron.


© Hannah Walleser

All you have to do is listen to the way a woman
sometimes rants to her friends about all the things
her husband does wrong while he waits on the side
holding her purse and biting his tongue

and you will know why the men in science
fiction movies who land their spaceships here
are not pictured tumbling out with a football
or wiping rocket grease off bulging biceps,

why they are always huddled behind a messenger
with palms lifted, their mouths set in anticipation,
their genitals retracted into a smooth elastic skin.


© Hannah Walleser

My granny used to speed skate on the marble clouds
of lake ice in Michigan. Her pine forest backyard
was perfect for blueberries and bears to course
through alongside enough tales of Paul Bunyan a landfill
couldn’t swallow them. She used her piece of the pie
to attend nursing school and passed with passion, not luck.

She once dated JFK, and patted the Enola Gay for luck
before it took off to deliver the mushroom clouds.
Years later she taught me to make her UP blueberry pie
in Wisconsin, and we fed the birds bread in the backyard.
Her wedding dress, now since living in a landfill,
was sewn out of Japanese parachute silk, of course

homemade, like her calligraphies that course
along her wedding program. It was some luck
that we salvaged the paper from ending up in the landfill
the winter the washer malfunctioned and invisible clouds
poured rain downstairs. We had to use the backyard
to sort out the basement’s treasures into a lopsided pie

of melted photographs, squishy sideboards, rusted pie
tins, and unmendable clothes. Through the course
of a thousand trips to the dumpster behind the backyard
we cleaned up the memories. The only luck
we had consisted of paper towels to soak up the clouds
of moisture that molded in puddles. Maybe the landfill

had a special place for broken Susie Smart: a landfill
hospital for easy bake ovens that burned the pie
and were retired to the basement after too many clouds
of char wafted out. We found sketches from the art course
that she took at a college women’s week, and as luck
would have it, the Xmas decorations evaded the backyard

too. The basement door opened onto the backyard
the way her house design planned, just beside the landfill
drop point for clothes at the mangle iron. Maybe luck
kept the nosy Polack neighbors away when the pizza pie
called us inside to eat. The clown makeup, of course,
disintegrated, and the cotton crèche set clouds

matted down in the backyard pile. Her pumpkin pie
and other recipes survived the landfill, in due course
of family memory, a good luck sign to taunt the clouds.


© Hannah Walleser