Dana Henry Martin
Dana Henry Martin’s work has appeared in The Adroit Journal, Barrow Street, Chiron Review, Cider Press Review, FRiGG, Muzzle, New Letters, Rogue Agent, Stirring, Willow Springs, and other literary journals. Martin’s poetry collections include the chapbooks Toward What Is Awful (YesYes Books), In the Space Where I Was (Hyacinth Girl Press), and The Spare Room (Blood Pudding Press). Their chapbook No Sea Here (Moon in the Rye Press) is forthcoming.
How to Turn a Hate March into a Jubilee Procession
— After George Sherwood Hunter’s Jubilee Procession in a Cornish Village, June 1897
Remove torches.
Add paper lanterns.
Remove logo T-shirts and jeans.
Add white Victorian dresses.
Add leather shoes with buttons
and tucked heels. Add bonnets
and bonnets and more bonnets.
Remove pavers, grass, black
sky. Add cobble. Add a single-mast
ship with no sail in the distance,
other ships farther, their masts
crisscrossed like toothpicks.
Add water that looks painted
and crackled. Add celadon sky
that can’t be teased from water
nor water teased from it.
Remove screams and teeth
and tonsils exposed to air.
Add children and four men,
one in a costume, one leaning
over a railing, one in a floppy hat,
one holding a basket full of sticks.
Remove stiff arms raised in
Sieg Heil salutes. Add gloved hands
that clutch lantern poles, free arms
hanging or perched like birds on a hip.
Remove city. Add village.
Remove hate masked as march.
Add jubilee parading as jubilee.
Remove anger looking for anchor.
Add far-reaching gaze like a woman
looking out over the wheat she’s grown
in a place where nothing should grow.
Add soft glow on cheeks. Add pointed toes.
