Poems by Courtney Hitson
By Courtney Hitson
When a freak infection captured my cat’s
sister, Darla, he fell through the gap in himself, left
by her loss. A sort of erasure, intense enough
to distinguish him into a before and after.
From a beginning they shared, Darla
sowed patches of wildflowers amongst
the canyons of his heart.
Last year, we saw them all
yanked at the root. My boy waited,
inconsolable, as in for his feet
to strike a bottom
no one but him could reach.
Surprises of grief mustered
from him the same thing
as it would from us: an entity
I can no longer call humanity.
Look at the creatures who surface
from our sceneries just as present,
just as eager to breathe as people
that you love.
To understand this is to choose
a plummet you know
is unending, to enter a wound
without the hope of it healing.
“Orca Story”
By Courtney
Hitson
In the Gibraltar Straight, orcas
have begun to damage yachts and schooners.
Biting rudders from boat-bottoms and head-budding
port-holes. Mohawked zeppelins
sloshing a pelagic jest.
Some suggest the whales intend it
as payback for warming waters. Already earthlings
for fifty million years, would they be bothered to want
a form of acceptance, stunted
as retribution? Orcas, glide, inseparable
from time: Liberated
to grow within a single present,
them and the moment, like fruit
and a tree. Their exploding spritzes
of exhales, like geysers of a sweet
laughter.
“A Jellyfish’s Bioluminescence”
By Courtney
Hitson
Gelatinous darling. Lantern’d
self, adrift and spasming in sparks.
500 million years, here, resequenced
into your threaded torch, a light
and a body, unparted
into parts, fetching awe from me, casual
as an errand. My flashlight, suddenly heavy
as a relayer’s dropped baton. You
are so much translucence—unwieldly with a score
of time that guts me, again and again.
- Courtney Hitson teaches English
at the College of the Florida Keys. She currently has work forthcoming in
Potomac Review, Pinch, Sky Island Journal, and Allium. Outside of writing, she
enjoys drawing, freestyle unicycling, and philosophy. Courtney and her husband,
Tom (also a poet), reside in Key West, Florida with their two cats.