Spare, Strange

Hannah Carrese

If one day your hand healed—
if, I mean,
you and your hand met a Lazarus and he rose
or washed water into wine
and bread into birds of the sea if, that is,
it was you
a girl leading the kings of France, you Francis
mending the breach between lion and lamb
you—virgin—told of the child
if all this:
do you believe or go mad or dismiss the ruse
of it—do
you submit your hand to scientist and skeptic
do you pocket it hoping that denim will
keep it from miracles? If?

(Do not mock the men the women who
know the oddity of themselves and
use it anyway.)

Hannah Carrese is from Colorado, where the prairie meets the Rocky Mountains. She now lives in Oxford, where she studies political theory and also the wolds and streams of England’s green and pleasant land.