Andrew Hemmert
Like Stars, Like Small-Town Churches
When we drove up to Denver
to attend the inspection of a house
that would, ultimately, not work for us,
red-tailed hawks were everywhere—
staking out the light posts,
scouring the bit of prairie
between the Inn-And-Out Burger
and the community college.
They were probably after mice or rats
or whatever could be carried off
to feed their new-hatched chicks.
Or was it too far
into Fall for any new hawks
to adorn those high nests,
the likes of which sometimes miraculously
hang on long after
the fledglings have left?
The house was a nest of problems.
Garage too small
to accommodate a car and still
allow a person to enter it,
no radon mitigation, no overflow
valves in the bathrooms,
hallways too narrow for Karen’s wheelchair.
And so as we went through
the litany of issues we were falling
out of love with it in real time,
the life we’d imagined living there
just blowing away, like how the dust
rose in wind from the in-progress interstate
we took there and back.
Most times I’ve made plans, reality
has carried them off,
though I am cursed
to be a planner, one who,
even if he knows the world
is a swirling current of indefinite seasons,
needs to impart some semblance
of control. Interstate, we do go on,
pitted by salt and overcommitted
to every direction under the sun.
The hawks were on the light posts
like traffic cameras, or like stars
above the cheap nativity scenes
of small-town churches
we passed on our way home.
Andrew Hemmert reads “Like Stars, Like Small-Town Churches”
Andrew Hemmert is the author of Blessing the Exoskeleton (Pitt Poetry Series) and Sawgrass Sky (Texas Review Press). His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in various magazines including The Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, The Kenyon Review, and The Southern Review. He won the 2018 River Styx International Poetry Contest. He earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and currently lives in Thornton, Colorado.