Cordelia Hanemann is currently a practicing writer and artist in Raleigh, NC. She has published in such journals as Turtle Island Quarterly, Connecticut River Review, Mainstreet Rag, and Laurel Review and in several anthologies: The Well-Versed Reader, Heron Clan IV, and Kakalak 2018. She has published a chapbook, Through a Glass Darkly, and her poem, “photo-op” was a finalist in the Poems of Resistance competition at Sable Press, and she has just been nominated for a Pushcart. Recently the featured poet for Negative Capability Press and in The Alexandria Quarterly, she is now working on a first novel about her roots in Cajun Louisiana.
separated from the house
meditation on Edward Hopper
separated from the house
by the tracks and the blank
space where the train once was
he stands barely lit
by lamplight or moonlight
whichever comes first
stays longest
he glares at the home where
he no longer belongs
but it does not glare
back it does not care
it withdraws behind opaque eyes
into its own dark history
refuses to move with him
into the future
fades in a wash-out of mist
the edges
whole swaths erased
as by a dissatisfied hand
no sunlight to make the shadows real
this pseudo light obscures what might
be seen
it does not illuminate
the house recedes into the plane
of prairie and sky
it seems lonely
Abstraction: Geometry of an Odalisk
Frantisek Kupka’s studies of “Girl with a Ball” for “Fugue”
the girl plays with the ball until she doesn’t;
the ball is a ball until it isn’t; disappearing
into circles and spheres, a fugal defiguration
–her body shrinks to the flatness of lines
on a page, a girl still, flat-chested, virginal,
untested, approached, broached by the artist’s eye,
–until she isn’t, until she’s curved shapes,
a geometry of lines, swaths of nude-blue
color–appropriated–carved by a vital pulse
of orange, colors drawn from a palette
of repressed urgencies– no one need know
about the girl or the ball or the breath;
what can we know of a young
girl’s playing naked in the summer air?
Saved by Cezanne’s Apples
The apples lie there, larger than life,
apples, leaping from the canvas, so many
canvases, so many apples—tempting;
you paint them, those apples, over and over,
like real apples you eat and eat again,
each bite of apple bursting anew in your mouth;
each brush stroke creating anew your artful apple,
each dab of color, an apple mood; motion of heart,
hand, arm, eye-to-apple, you paint them
–apples–forever, until you are surrounded:
apples that squat—stolid and bold—in bowls,
on tables, apples suspended in air, hung on walls
—there they all are: watchful apples, apples poised,
permanent, hungry, between you and the door.
