Harrison Hamm

 You were the last time I saw a dragonfly.
The candles melted all at once & I was scared
the fire inside you went out.
Who could I be without a temple?
Nothing. An anonymous goose.
Or I could be oarless. Caught upstream
in the burning water—& yet
you want a motorbike. You’ve got that damn dream
of going Harley Davidson down the aisle.
I imagine you caught in a mangled net.
Champagne dewdrops chandeliering the empty room. Still,
like a tarot spell, a perfect bolt-rip in the veil—somehow I’m
right there. Those odd days, when I’d wake obediently
before eleven. Wake.
Walk the wetlands. Photograph the crow perched on the steeple.
The boys running in their shorts. How one day the crows came in two.
Revelation season, as if the words swam back to me.
One look & the fish forget their place—
It was summer in January.
We were the bees, a heartburst of bees across the wood—
Who could I be without the sound?
Those thousand dragon wings pulsing as one, deeper blue—
tides of two moons made
into a door—
& it makes me cry
because I still don’t understand it.

—————

HARRISON HAMM is a poet, screenwriter, and educator from Bolivar, Tennessee. His debut chapbook, If It’s Country Music You Want, won the 2025 Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship and will be published in 2026. Selected for Best New Poets and named a finalist for the 2025 Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship, his writing appears in POETRY, Missouri Review, The Poetry Review, DIAGRAM, Foglifter, Verse Daily, and more. In 2027, he will earn an MFA in creative writing at New York University as a Goldwater Writing Workshop Fellow.