Five Poems
by Andrew Hanson
The Beatitudes
The criminal inherits
The light of the moon.
The poor do not spirit away.
Palpitating heart,
The pure testament,
That bind of suburban dystopias,
Apparitional comfort,
Hash-ridden couches.
Trap-houses,
The tabernacled bodies,
The hungry and the thirsty.
The multitudes, the besieged
In the dead combs
Of honeybees
Who brook the fire
Of liquid expropriations.
The mathematicians
Comb rabbit holes,
The black pillories
Trash the black-bag rivers.
The mind of Boethius
Gives birth from a prison cell
Levitation, the cloud
Of martyrs.
Piss-drunk hipsters,
The foaming at the mouths.
The spit-shine eyes,
The homeless man,
The boot off of public land,
The partitioned sidewalks,
The extirpated, the limestone tribes.
The one epistle that abolishes
The man and the woman
Into one principle, one thousand,
Dream-studded cups
Of the saxophone spill over.
The desert Stylites,
The tip-toe transcendence,
The exclamation points, the colonnades,
The origami effigies,
Simone Weil and Sheikh Bedreddin,
The hoisted up,
The roads dusted of cigar-workers,
The weavers, the metes—
Alcatraz, May 2019
Walled in by the waters
and guarded by the blue gums,
the cape tulip busts out,
bright red at the edges,
to the screech of gulls
perched on the rusted edges
of the fences, and the old fort,
stripped and scoured like the bodies
of the condemned. He’s headed
for Mexico, the scillas whisper.
as the wind picks up, and shakes
the scillas’ leaves into an awkward Salsa–
Florida Poetry
A surfer and a stoner,
all those whom the language
of the tides lure.
A drug lord, the rafter,
the reactionary, rivet
to the groggy horizons.
The day-laborer, the velvet,
the variegated flowers that spill
like syllables over stagnant canals—
A living fire in the downtowns
and the rooftops,
and the trap houses
that harness the honey of bees.
The farmer, the fisherman
let them flee back
to the diseased orange trees,
the insects hiss in the mangroves
and their roots that slowly
writhe in the lukewarm waters.
The poet, hibiscus-eyed,
solders to the bleach-bone coral–
In Excelsis Deo
*Oringinally published by Rough Diamonds Poetry
God is permitted to exist
in poetry. God is immanence.
God is the language. God is Jesus,
who is pure dispossession.
Poetry is the streets
even when it's about the peonies.
Poetry is the haunch of the beast.
Poetry is the last synapse firing off
from the prisoner’s brain like a rusted piston
as his heart bursts after
a lethal dose of potassium chloride...
The ants elegantly dance
in tune, but they are not permitted
to live alongside us like a dog or cat
or even the tedious parakeet.
The cicatrix in the corner
of the kitchen from where they crawl
will never close like the bark
of a fur tree. The soft bones
of the sardine, bathed in olive oil,
lodge between clefts in the teeth,
as the choir thunders: in excelsis Deo,
in excelsis Deo.
A Veritable Transformation
The boot smiles
On the neck.
The French philosopher
Transmogrifies Hegel’s chamberpot
Into gold.
With a single mustard seed,
A tunnel veins through the mountains,
A lake parches the sand,
As the hand is shaken.
The elements of the contract
Assume a holy trinity:
The invisible stilts,
The silent cricks,
That stalk you like an X, online.
But on the walk downtown,
The restrooms are not cheap.
The restaurant, chic,
the golden calf,
Expropriates the neighborhood.
The thumbs-up from the valet
Pierces this dimension like a veil.
In the back alley, Jesus vinifies
Dumpster juice.
BIO: Andrew Rader Hanson is a poet and photographer, who lives in South Florida. In his free time, he lifts weights, hikes, practices languages, and reads widely. His work has been published by Spectrum Literary Journal, Pembroke Magazine, The Hong Kong Review and more. He was also nominated for a BOTN award and the Scottie Merril Poetry award. His chapbook, This Warehouse Manufactures Thirst, is out with Bottlecap Press. He also co-founded the Vivian Laramore Rader Reading Group.