Week 9: Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick

He Asked What Made My Brain Do That Thing
Where I End Up On the Floor With The World Ending

When I was ten, my mother did not want me
to become more frantic than I was &

walked from room to room shutting doors
to hide me from me. No one thought to ask

if I was a tornado. One has to be able
to control that kind of thing

& even if she raised me as one raises
a night-blooming cereus in a greenhouse,
I'd still become someone
struggling to want to be held,

a thing that cleans the world out—
See how wide I can open my mouth?

Shannon Elizabeth Hardwick’s work has appeared in Salt Hill, The Texas Observer, PANK, Four Way Review, Sugar House Review, Harpur Palate, Huffington Post UK, SWWIM, among others. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, Hardwick serves as the poetry editor for The Boiler Journal and her first full-length, Before Isadore, was published by Sundress Publications.