One Side of an Interview with a Vase

Hana Widerman

Poetry

After Anna May Wong and Anne Anlin Cheng

A: It was like being a star… no that’s really not it.

A: His hands? I felt great spiders running from underneath. 

A: The door closed and never reopened right. 

A: Water has been known to evade me, due to the cracks. 

A: I feel the pain of a cut stem. It shrieks for days. When it turns to silence, I am alone again. 

A: When I was near the window, the blue jay stared for hours. 

A: I am a machine come to life. Metal, steam, porcelain. They hate to hear my breathing. 

A: He drew his voice alongside the deer on my side. I felt it erase itself and return to the field. 

A: Horse coming out of green sand. Disaster satin. 

A: Tell me, what was your theory?

A: They will take me apart. Turn my words upside down. Pour them into the dirt. 

A: I am a woman of two times. A green hill constructed from memory. A column of faithful light. 

A: I am to be studied. Erotics of aesthetics, lay your claims. 

A: Even up here, I learn a kind of arithmetic. Counting the footsteps. 

A: I speak German like nobody’s business. 

A: One of five ornaments in the hall. 

A: The moon carrying a silver bowl of wine, scentless? No, that’s not the right image. I’m a fragrant fucker. 

---

HANA WIDERMAN (she/her) is a poet

originally from California. She graduated from

Princeton University with a degree in English

and received her MFA from Cornell University,

where she worked as a lecturer. Her poetry

has been awarded the Auburn Witness Poetry

Prize and appears in The Threepenny Review, The

Rumpus, The Cincinnati Review, and elsewhere.

Her work has been supported by the Saltonstall

Foundation, the Outpost Foundation, and

the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop, where

she was awarded a Katharine Bakeless Nason

Participant Scholarship in Poetry. She is

currently a PhD student in English at Brown

University.

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