Arden Eli Hill - Two Poems

Hanging Gilded Girls                                                                      

My parents hang portraits

of girls who don’t exist.

There I am above the bedside stand

at five years-old, my dead name

embroidered down my dress like a scar.

My daughter, my bold one

who spends the summer shirtless

hangs across from me framed

in gold beside the dresser.

A hat obscures her face.

She’s just a blue gown

and hands holding flowers

I don’t like that picture

my mother says

when my lover shows her

a snapshot of her son in a dress.

Why not, he questions,

and she mutters something

about the image being blurry.

When I was seventeen,

I sat for a formal portrait.

It’s across from the couch

in the living room.

Who is she, my cousin asks,

that girl with the long hair?

My mother tells him

the painting is just something

that came with the gilded frame.

Potentials      

I was a moment after the damn broke. -Joanne G Patterson

1

The girl has no pond,

so she holds her head

deep as she can underwater

in the bath’s cool basin.

She surfaces when she can’t

command her lungs to quiet,

proof that the body is betrayer.

2

It’s only a few extra,

and they are sold over the counter,

still the school sent her home

to rest for the rest of the day.

Soft and dreamy,

she’d liked the ritual of swallow

until after her hand was empty.

3

Even though she lives alone,

she hides the bottles of Midori.

It’s an accident, that day she’s nearly hit,

as she’s crossing the street

to a friend’s waiting car

for a lift to avoid driving drunk.

4

The tumor has nothing to do with this.

It’s bent like a toad, pushing

everything else in the body aside.

It breaks into flesh, 

doesn’t respect boundaries.

5

She showers in the morning,

takes meds with lead plant tea,

then goes back to bed.

The scar on her stomach

where they severed her

from one of her deaths

is sore even three years later.

6

Moments are detritus.

The eddies rally them together

where they coalesce and make her world

impossibly slow, then still.

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Despite being from Louisiana, Arden has never wrestled an alligator, only a kangaroo.  He is the author of a chapbook, Bloodwater Parish, that delves into, race, gender, sexuality, and adoption in southern Louisiana. Arden’s most recent work is in new words press, Tethered, Impossible Archetype, and the Hippocampus Anthology. In case you are still thinking about the kangaroo, Arden won.