by Shloka Shankar
Hannah Writes About What Usually Happens on Sunday But Particularly Last Sunday
Mother feeds the army
of teenagers who touch her
behind hedges. I watch my friend
undo bandages where her
father last left his mark. She
steals his cocaine in return &
offers it to me. / Flying is not
a religious experience, I said,
It is preservation. How
my mother feeds everyone
but me. / Is it like how you
fuck a stranger to see if
the body can distance itself
from itself, she said &
do you really believe
you’re so lucky—
that your parents never, not
once, wanted you dead?
Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick’s work has appeared in Salt Hill, The Texas Observer, Devil’s Lake, Four Way Review, Sugar House Review, SWWIM, and Huffington Post U.K., among others. A graduate from Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal and her first full-length, Before Isadore, was published by Sundress Publications. She currently lives in a village outside Cambridge, England.
Shloka Shankar is a writer and visual artist from Bangalore, India. A Best of the Net nominee, her poems and artwork are forthcoming in talking about strawberries all of the time, NationalPoetryMonth.ca (AngelHousePress, 2020), Contemporary Haibun Online, Acorn, and Kissing Dynamite among others. Shloka is the founding editor of Sonic Boom, its imprint Yavanika Press, and Senior Editor at Human/Kind Journal.