Jordan Hamel
Fraternal twin rivers womb
the memorial plaza. A town
in utero, pet food cannery,
chapel of ease, hockey rink,
camping store. We carried
folding chairs to the oxbow
behind the family pole barn,
where your inheritance idles.
On Looking Glass River: muskrats
skitter over algae like Jesus
lizards for the inland gods.
My jeans fall like statues.
Serrated trees grate skin
off our backs. The dust
butters my knees. My ass,
white as a doe tail, snapped
by your father’s trigger
capture wildlife cam. Its motion-
activated eye, a casualty, buried
in the cutbank upon discovery.
Now it will watch only rotten
earth and snake worms. Sorry dad.
No one likes to see things
grow young together.
We wipe each other down
with dead basswood and socks.
Jordan Hamel is an Aotearoa New Zealand writer and Fulbright Scholar. He holds an MFA from the University of Michigan. His debut poetry collection, Everyone is Everyone Except You, was published in New Zealand by Dead Bird Books in 2022 and by Broken Sleep in the UK in 2024. He is the winner of the 2023 Sonora Review Poetry Competition, and the 2023 New Writers UK Poetry Prize. He was the runner-up in the 2023 American Literary Review Poetry Contest and a finalist for the 2024 BOMB Poetry Contest. Recent work can be found or is forthcoming in POETRY, Poetry Daily, Electric Literature, Kenyon Review, The Adroit Journal, FENCE, and elsewhere.
Artwork: “Untitled” by Shelbey Leco
Mixed media collage