“what was I supposed to say”
Alyssa Hanna
Artist Statement: All of the work I have submitted is directly related to my experience as a mentally ill, mixed race adoptee and person who can get pregnant/give birth-- a group of people that are constantly used as props in other peoples' arguments about politics, identity, and morality, yet ignored when we ourselves speak. Adoptees, especially international ones, do not have the same human rights guaranteed under the US Constitution that non-adoptees have, and if my work can shed light on that at all, or make any other fellow adoptee feel a little less alone, my mission will be accomplished.
i don’t remember how many letters i wrote that i never sent.
i do remember decomposing and waiting for a tomb to open up like a morning glory
at a spring dawn so i could crawl inside and seal myself as an envelope
the years stacked themselves in piles with masses of correspondence that the mailbox never saw.
when the birds flew north they tried to sing the song i taught them but forgot the words along the way.
i never found the hawks they lost, but if i make moonshine on my birthday i can forget i ever had a reason for following them.
lily, azalea, climbing onto rooftops to share light from the sky, morning glory left on the bush beneath the bedroom window. where did those letters fly,
those paper planes swallowed by the hungriest air
Alyssa Hanna's poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southern Humanities Review, The Mid-American Review, The Laurel Review, Arc Poetry Magazine, Passages North, PRISM International, and others. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and for Best of the Net, was a finalist in the 2017 James Wright Poetry Competition, a semi-finalist for the Hellebore scholarship, and a semi-finalist for the 2020 Nightboat Poetry Prize. alyssa is a Contributing Editor at Barren Magazine and works as a copywriter by day. She lives in New York with her fiancé and two lizards. follow her @alyssawaking on twitter, instagram, ko-fi, and tumblr.