Susan Hahn

After the Fourth of July On this night of the mid- summer festival of fire, where liquid explosives look like the arch and ache of the willow tree so near your grave, on this night of the awaiting mid- wife who lulled you in- to this world, the light all violet because the Earth and stars inclined toward each other, she also sleeps, she who was your first deliverer, guiding you out of your mother—her bluing skin no small sign of the future cyanosis of her spirit for no small journey was it to this country to bring you to birth in this torch song heat and an anthem of a free nation's conception of combustions: rosins, petroleum, tallow, arsenic and worse, as you, too, fell from the sky of her body with me a microscopic egg inside— half the composition that made up my own toss and tumble to this crash of ground I sit over and bless while you lie under, under the willow, under this world that no midwife nor wavelength can under- standably reach. So I stand in this over- determined fire forced out like bullets upon a target— the pulled trigger releasing the hammer that strikes the impacted mixture— hailstorm and hymn of memories. And the outstretched womb involutes and the abdominal wall tightens and inside all abandoned encasements the night over the day darkens.