Imagining a Forest by the Sea

Hanae Jonas

Self-slaking exile into the land of weeping spruces.


I still know in the right landscape
how to stay.            


            How to remain close
to the earth
or any range they’d call alive—


I am not my ugly evidence, I am


still armed by illusion
of sororal touch:


lank grasses under
my hands.


Safe from the guidebook: my extant capacity


to defect
to the flushed logic of deceit—                      


                                        Scandal inside of which


no contract with the drab.


No drowsy silt             always up ahead.


No use
for dark exits


to leave through.

 

Hanae Jonas is a poet from Vermont. Her work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, West Branch, jubilat, The Journal, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan and lives in Los Angeles.