grounding techniques

AQ Hanna
5: see; 4: hear; 3: feel; 2: smell; 1: taste

v.

light breaking against the chlorine summer
blue in your skin & my arm
like a measuring tape, my voice like a focus point
on an empty chart; a constant unit of distance i use
by you, against you,
microscopic in these shifting stars.

iv.

time falling backwards on the hardwood
floor pushing against your body lurching forwards,
heavy as april rain swears
something should come of this
order of the heavenly world collapsing
into bodies that will never converge
and the audience waiting at a fever pitch.

iii.

movement: eternal motions
of the moon rotating around
the earth, spinning around the sun
each year. your hands scored
across rotating stories coating our tongues
in autumn’s procession, summer reducing
the rise and fall of surface-broken light.

ii.

again, the chlorine; the plants and the roots
and the trees claiming place
against the earth away from what is alive;
brand my ground surrounded
in petrichor; heaven’s premonition
saturated around my ribs.

i.

you, the center of it all and a fixed view
you can’t surrender: the universe
made from your name like filters
of reference for thirst; tangled ultraviolet
rays broken against my tongue.

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AQ Hanna hails from the east of two hemispheres; they writes as both. Enamored by the heavenly world, she often weaves the stars into her words which have appeared in the Collective Art Magazine and the Peahce Project online. They are particularly fond of cafes with couches, odd-shaped salt and pepper shakers, and impressing her friends with her night sky app on her phone.

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