We are first restricted to a family of images
Stories that cover what they express
As distinguished as dreams
They are reveries
They give the imagination what it wants
But they aren’t wanted, they are willed
To be trapped and therefore diverted
As the suspended floors of an apartment
Hide our suspension from the ground

What does happen if I am late
I seem in such a rush
But to take pleasure in this speed
I miss the next train just in time

It was this waiting
At the side of the road and its embarrassment
That made it good to lose track of time
Except I had lost the pleasure in the future
For just having missed the time
I might have been walking
The belated stretch of the next hour

The town in between this town and the next
It taught us of the distance between the roads
And the highways, since that distance could be observed
So that distance could be understood

The distance has confused me
It doesn’t make any sense
Why I would associate today with tomorrow
Like the resemblance between cousins and aunts
They double themselves and people around them
Between the middle of thought and conversation
Organize thought into expression
Out of thought and into life doubling
Itself badly it doesn’t make sense
It wastes itself if it leads to sleep

*

Action negates unhappiness
I’m never sad but when I sleep
I’m not even sad then
For I have often dreamed of unhappiness
And waked myself with laughing
Laughter is not a big lie
It makes a bad life into reality

Granite was treated with anger
In the process of moving from reverie
Into the dreams of true sleep
We recovered activity that was sedimented
A deep lake gathered within a valley
And brought noise across it
So the difference between an echo and its source
Gathered onto a single plane, an engine
That makes noise like sheep calling
From up here echoes talk

Beauty confirms beauty
Through the repetition of two feelings
Dispersed into the atmosphere
And combined with diurnal life
Nocturnal dreams wait for day
To be passively embraced
They want to become again ours
As if audience to an original work
They smile at their involvement
Because we have amused them

Then I am conscious of the beauty of this world
Only in repose
Night becomes dark
It takes away details
Like ears to the ground listening for cars
Water is an eye
It doesn’t blink it just dreams
Out of stone it makes geometry

*

The poem is an insanity
It travels through mirrors
Happy in discourse
These images weren’t made by life
They were never experienced
To be experienced they are impossible
We imagined them to take flight
To no longer belong with waking life

Waking from life interrupted
Life mixes with memory and spits it back out
It is one composite person
Who is like a station
So we are passing through them
One composite, large person
To whom we are constantly throwing clothes

is a poet living in New Haven. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Hannah’s poems can be found in Cleveland Review of Books, Chicago Review, R&R, Works & Days, and elsewhere. Her chapbook, Screen Memory, is forthcoming in Spring 2026 with The Year. She’s a PhD student in English at Yale University and an assistant editor of The Yale Review. Alongside Scout Turkel and Samira Abed, she co-edits Common Place, a seasonal publication of poetry and poetics.