If You Have a Minute to Spare, Tell Me Everything You Know by Gabrielle Grace Hogan

How awkward that nothing significant changes.

My lover lifts my shirt with every kindness

I’ve typically found inconsequential to sex.

The Texas breeze holds its hands in my face, says

Know how to name everything. West Bluff. Spoon River.

Don’t fill yourself with the possibilities of time,

or the inclination to explain: the body will do that.

Memory a skin, a wind flapping against its flag—

How can you not know me? I asked of the orange dog,

to which she had no reply but to throw back her ears

like a child, playing airplane, throws back their arms,

or like a satellite dish flexes toward pursuit of a sound.

My lover, despite the shirt, still leaves me.

How much has to happen before I do not lock doors

against the ghosts’ pursuit, and ghosts

are not in the things but in us, lavenderly moving

and being moved through bodylessness, is it me

or is it the bell breaking skin? Bell, open the hour.

Gabrielle Grace Hogan is the author of two chapbooks, *Soft Obliteration* (Ghost City Press, 2020) and *Love Me With the Fierce Horse Of Your Heart* (Ursus Americanus Press, 2023). Her work has been featured in *TriQuarterly, Salt Hill, CutBank, DIAGRAM*, and others. Find more at her website, gabriellegracehogan.com. She lives in Austin, Texas. 

19 June 2023