Chera Hammons | Texas Strong | Poets Resist | Glass: A Journal of Poetry

Chera Hammons is the Writer-in-Residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Foundry, Rattle, Ruminate, Tar River, THRUSH, Tupelo Quarterly, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award for Poetry and nominee for 2018 Best of the Net. Forthcoming books include a volume of poetry through Sundress Publications and a novel through Torrey House Press. She lives in Amarillo, TX.

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Also by Chera Hammons: The Traveler’s Guide to Bomb City Recycled Explosions Amaranthine Hour

Poets Resist
Edited by Kwame Opoku-Duku
September 12, 2019

Chera Hammons

Texas Strong

My mother has always told me that seeing blue dragonflies means it will rain soon. The little girl in me believed it. I still haven’t lived long enough to know if it’s true. I might never live long enough. Everywhere I go, there’s a man with a gun. Everywhere I look, I look for the bullet. Still, enough of us survive for the world to keep unfurling. Everything happens, all of the time. Every August, the wasps make houses of mud mouthful by mouthful, building temples around petrified spiders. The weavers vanish from their silver hammocks to wait in sweating darkness against the brick. Sealed into tombs with their enemies’ children, they are preserved by paralysis until the day they watch their own devouring. Everywhere I look, there’s a man with a gun. It’s September already, I tell everyone I see, as if we all fell asleep driving here, and if you believe in an afterlife, you must believe in waking up somewhere different, a different version of yourself. Everywhere I look, I find a bullet. Where did the summer go? Nowhere. It just goes. I want to ask, Is life only an aversion to death? You will miss not knowing how the world ends. There are so many times you will think, This is it. But it won’t be yet. Then maybe it will. We wait for our chambers to open to the sun. The orb weavers return the next year, and the next. The horses, when they walk through the ripening grass, once again drape those gossamer threads of web across their cannon bones. The dragonflies will be seaglass blue, which may mean everything or nothing at all. Listen: there has always been some hurt you won’t suffer, and some other hurt you will.