You are reading Fiddleblack #2
In the dialect of firmly-planted feet and chest-borne script
the souvenir pronounces,
I love this place.
Face-to-face with a house key, gaping up from a coffee
cup or wine glass.
We invite these trinkets
into our drawers, our homes, and still, we don’t allow them
to assimilate.
Souvenirs depend upon
narration, our telling of the way a thing arrived into our life,
naming the land
we have crossed.
This means that our belongings grip a part of us. It helps
to handle them
with our eyes closed.
Hannah Stephenson is a poet, editor, instructor, and singer-songwriter living in Columbus, Ohio. Hannah earned her MA in English from the Ohio State University in 2006, and her poems and songs have appeared in publications such as The Nervous Breakdown, qarrtsiluni, MAYDAY, Whale Sound, FORTH, Spoonful, Birmingham Arts Journal and anthologies from Lazy Gramophone Press. She is a poetry blogger for The Huffington Post, and is the founder of Paging Columbus!, a literary arts monthly event series.