Hannah Nathanson’s poetry has been published in Canvas Literary Journal, Wordplay, Speak Your Mind & Shape Your World, as well as several self-produced zines. She lives in Buffalo, where she attends City Honors High School and acts as a Youth Ambassador for the Just Buffalo Writing Center.
2 poems by Hannah Nathanson
The Sweet Home: Stomach as a Safe-Deposit Box
Stomach sits and admires the interior design.
Stomach dressed up in black and looks like tar;
He plans to steal all your energy. He growls
and it sounds as if he’s calling across a cliff.
Stomach draws attention to who you are
in juxtaposition to who you thought you’d be.
Stomach’s never shook hands with either version of you.
Stomach doesn’t have hands.
Stomach does know how to carry a tune, though.
Stomach strums the guitar in patterns that he thinks are your favorite.
You don’t tell Stomach you haven’t listened to those songs in years.
Stomach is a pooling cave of wet wood
and red glue that dries clear.
Stomach makes your abdomen ache.
Stomach loves that use of the word ache,
swallows it slow and tears apart the etymology.
Stomach shifts his weight
in front of the mirror and tugs his hair.
Stomach feels nauseous and turns the lights down.
Stomach crawls into bed next to your body
and starts the performance.
He assimilates bones inch by inch.
Stomach asks why you use the word esophagus
so often in your writing.
You tell him you don’t know.
Stomach becomes a storage unit for frost bitten feet.
Stomach is a cavity,
a digestive abyss humming songs about the southland on your own front steps.
A Teenager’s Natural Habitat
and so I picture you living on in all the places we used to live in together. i picture you going to the grocery store and not buying me gluten-free corn chips and soda. i picture you walking home along the train tracks because it's the quickest route. and you know that because i showed you. i picture you lying in sleeping bags next to your twin sized bed. because even though we could have, it never felt right to properly sleep together. i picture you existing in the setting we were always confined by. the suburban places in a small northern city. a communitive home shared by two almost strangers.