HR HEGNAUER

from WHEN THE BIRD IS NOT A HUMAN

THE STAIRWELL

To spill wooden sounds into the morning
like this place
           is the most accurate stair
and that place
                is just full of lung space
until this stair follows that stair.

They’ve always been like this:
these stairs.
One stepping upon another.
This is how we built them.

And this is how we’ll weather them:
I’ll touch this lip until it’s smoothed itself over in an oiled way.
You’ll touch the next lip just the same,
and when we compare the weather,
I will close my eyes.

THE HALLWAY

I fell asleep.
The light or no light.
What am I doing?

I am looking for the room,
               but the room does not exist.
So I built a door,
               and painted it blue;
               surrounded it with bricks.

Still, the room does not exist.

THE BEDROOM

The vent blows warm air into this room
                  until the night becomes its latest hour.
I listen until the air becomes confused with its sounds —
                  the same way a word becomes demented once you’ve looked at it for too long.
This is the part when I imagine that the air sounds
                  are actually another human’s breathing pattern.

And I think the air believes me. I mean, I think the sounds believe me.
                  Or at the very least, they’re too confused to know the difference,
and that’s become good enough for me.

THE HAUNTING

She walked in an elle-shaped pattern:
                  A white night gown.
                  Blood upon the cuffs.
I was not supposed to be here.
This much was clear.

I left the bedroom to enter the bedroom of another,
but the haunts here were even greater.

When every light was a candle
and the wind was inside the room,
the darkness was as thick as bees.
Were you the one who left the gate open?
               No.
Well that’s how all the bees got in.

HR Hegnauer is the author of Sir (Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs). She is a book designer and website designer specializing in working with independent publishers as well as individual artists and writers. HR is a member of the feminist publishing collaborative Belladonna*, and the poets’ theater group GASP: Girls Assembling Something Perpetual. She received her MFA in Writing & Poetics from Naropa University, where she has also taught in the Summer Writing Program.