ELLEN HAGAN

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Lately I’ve been looking up—just to see everyone else looking down. Electrified. Electron-ified.
Electronic-fight. Fright. Fried. In-En-lightened with digital light. Late night. Screenshot shine. Their
eyes wide & glossy, sheen & glow glow. Swipe, swipe, swipe, scroll, swipe, scroll, swipe, swipe, spinal
slide, curved curvature, cocked forward. Scroll, shine, swipe swipe, eyes glow, glossy, shine shine.
Got to get up to get down. 6:45am yoga. Fish pose to correct the slump slump slump. Crouching
toward, pinched & pulled in. Digitized. Media Mayhem. Technological trauma. What I want - all the
info I could ever need. Search: Disaster. Murder of crows. Portland invasion by..., Kim Kardashian
sunglasses, cool shoes, Spanish lessons, goodreads, Amazon, obsession. Search: Myself. Daydream.
Hazardous. Suppression. Surprise find. Clementines. Whole Foods. Lebanon. Visiting Palestine. Salt
Houses, hummus, the best recipes for chicken fried steak, chicken pot pie, dunk tank, tricked out.
Post Malone, the future of the…post office. Nipsey Hussle. South Central. Puberty. Kentucky.
Zillow. Hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello hello
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To both girls dipping bread in bowls of savory black beans in the Condesa—
Mexico City, April 2019

You two are such earth girls. How you meander
every street. Ashore. Asunder. How you bend
& flow. How you occupy space & don't fold. Flail
your all bodies to & away. Every city is yours. You
walk unafraid. Unencumbered still. Still girls. Still
so much of your lives to come. Hoping. Hoping.
You carve an open wound in me. To watch you
saunter, taste the world. Frolic & last. It's to see
you about to be grown. Up. And as much
as I love, love it. It breaks all of me apart. Too.

  

Search the Distance

      or what it means to land
         or space or matter or the length
            of goodbye. or I miss you. or when
               will you return? oh mothering. oh trajectory
                  oh landscape & time. oh light that keeps stretching
                      oh sky & guilt. oh sex & disaster. oh keeping you alive
                          oh breath & time. oh sponge of muscle. oh the way you grip
                              oh grit. & pleasure. oh sunlight & plants & oxygen. oh swing-set
                                  on a night of sunsets & planets. oh planet of my lungs & hearts
                                      oh blanket of blessings & palm trees & caffeine & lust & head lice
                                          & all the ways to say I'm needy & I'm needing. & I need you. & I'm lost
                                              & there's more world than you can even imagine. & it's all there—waiting.

ELLEN HAGAN is a writer, performer, and educator. She is the author of the poetry collections: Crowned and Hemisphere, and Watch Us Rise, a YA collaboration with Renée Watson. She has a poetry collection forthcoming from Northwestern University Press in 2020 and a middle grade novel in verse from Bloomsbury in 2021. Ellen's poems and essays can be found on ESPNW, in the pages of Creative Nonfiction, Underwired Magazine, She Walks in Beauty (edited by Caroline Kennedy), Huizache, Small Batch, and Southern Sin. A proud Kentucky writer, Ellen is a member of the Affrilachian Poets, Conjure Women, and is co-founder of the girlstory collective. She lives with her husband and daughters in New York City.