Winner of 2022 Betsy Joiner Flanagan Award in Poetry for her book Rain, Wind, Thunder, Fire, Daughter
Wood | Word
Ponderosa: the jigsaw pillars that invoke
a spiritual feeling, pillars evolved to survive
surface fires, their lower limbs dropped with age.
Ponderosa: the name a Scottish botanist gives
the pine while botanizing along the Spokane
River in 1826. Ponderosa: in Latin, heavy,
weighty, significant. The Latin name became—
unusually among trees—the common name. Ponder-
osa: the tree of many names: long-leafed
pine, pumpkin, yellowbelly, bull pine, black-
jack, red pine, silver pine, pino real (true
pine). Ponderosa: ponderous: meditative,
labored, profound, slow because of great weight,
like a book pinning the pen in place.
Psalm Sleeping Between Circles & Lines
And God separated the light from the darkness.
Genesis 1:4
How God’s name divides (the wicked |
the righteous) the way my father and I
build a fence to keep the neighbor’s knapweed
from our garden. To build a fireline, cut
and scrape vegetation till you reach mineral
soil, a strip wide enough to stop embers
from blowing across like seeds hungry to root
and feed. Eventually the firefighters
do prevail. Do encircle. Do contain. The edge
then felt with bare hands to find what heat
remains. Let no fire escape.
For a fire escape,
he hides a ladder under my bed | over the bed
a boy spreads paper hearts, red as the letters
I write then burn out the window.
Sonnet with a Mouth Full of Dollar Bills
Economy: the production and consumption of goods
and services and the supply of money as in “Ponderosa
pine fuel[s] the economies of the West beginning
in the 1860s.” Economy: the proper management
of the body, diet, regimen (obsolete). At thirteen,
I exchange spaghetti for celery, cereal for the belly’s
bright ache. Economy: a sparing or careful use.
Railroads induce clearcutting. I dream of cutting
flesh from bones, pelvis, femur, clavicle, rib cage,
breasts and sex erased as the red numbers blink
down: 130 to 108. Economy: relating to the inter-
dependence of living things. How the mothers praise
my body—straight, pale, and clean as the logs
laid at the lumber mill north of Coeur d’Alene.
Sonnet Starting with Arson
August 2015. When the smoke settles
in the city like sediment in a stream, my mother
buys masks, forbids us from opening windows,
the heat climbing through the old house to breed
in the attic where I sleep. An hour away
near Fruitland, a man dies trying to save his farm.
The ceiling drops, the sky so close I reach up
and choke God with one hand. Thus men are held
in the hand of God over the pit of hell... the fire
in their own hearts struggling to break out. The Forest
Service documents the success of Initial Attack
containing fires in Washington and Oregon. I
document the color of the sun cutting through
the haze, its eye unblinking, red as fish eggs.
Forty miles south of my parents’ house, a wildfire decimates the small town of
Malden and consumes thousands of acres of wheat
becoming witness
was not
enough
outside the ash-filled foundation of what was once
i’ve seen loss i’ve
corkscrewed
split
off
This wildfire season has been
the signals of climate change
the future
a blackened brick shell
nearby
i wish i
returned
why
save
I
fire
spells end spells beginning
space creates
others
Hannah Dierdorff is a poet from the scablands and pine savannas of Washington, the unceded ancestral land of the interior Salish people. Most recently, she's lived with her occasionally feral black cat in Virginia where she received her MFA from the University of Virginia and worked with the Appalachian Conservation Corps. She is the recipient of the 2022 Dogwood Literary Award for poetry, the 2022 Daniel Pink Memorial Poetry Prize, and a Vermont Studio Center Fellowship. Her writing has appeared in journals such as Cut Bank, Arkansas International, About Place,
and Willow Springs.