Christine Hamm is a PhD candidate in English Literature at Drew University. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript, Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in The Adirondack Review, Pebble Lake Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, and many others. She has been nominated twice for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at CUNY. The Transparent Dinner, her book of poems, was published by Mayapple Press in 2006 and her second book, Saints & Cannibals, is due out this fall. Christine was a runner-up to the Poet Laureate of Queens.
Fall 2009
Table of Contents - Vol. V, No. 3
Christine Hamm
My uncle tells me not to
touch the tiny blue eggs
nested in the oleander bush
outside his front door.
His doorbell sounds
like a fading ice-cream
truck. Robins congregate
on his lawn, singing a Beatle's
album in reverse. On the front
steps I wear heavy gloves
meant for a much larger
man, but everything is breaking,
opening its yellow eyes.
Construction in the woods
again keeps me up all night.
Someone has left a baby there,
and men are trying to find it;
pitchforks, shovels, specially
trained terriers with squeals
that sound like angels crying.
The lights themselves have
a noise, a rough engine hum.
Remember when I fell into the well
when I was four? I still have the scar
on my forehead. I think of that opening
dark every time your tail lights dim,
further and further into the trees.
© Christine Hamm
