Hannah McMahon is a creative writing major at NVU-Johnson. Their writing includes themes of grief, nostalgia, spirits, and, of course, love.

New Year Musings

My home town feels empty on New Year’s Day.
Fog surrounds the inner city,
breaking it off from the rest of Barre.
Main street is barren; store fronts dark, and desolate,
with signs promoting holiday sales in every window.
Today is the new year, a blank slate,
symbolically and visually so.
I drive past Elmwood cemetery,
past Lincoln House,
towards my grandmother’s.

I drive through the neighborhood where I grew up.
The red house on the corner is illuminated, still decorated
For Christmas. Inside,
a woman sits in her chair, unaware of what happened
in her house for a hundred years.
Does Nat still paint in the room at the top of the stairs?
Perhaps not, as we are gone.
There are no longer any McMahons to
watch over on Franklin Street.

Spring

Birds of a feather fly together
engraved on the granite below.
Warn with age, the letters displayed
show only in sunlit hours.

Queen Anne’s lace grows between stones;
the lonely petals that have fallen from their stems
lay in agony upon moss-covered ground.

Daylight creeps across the budding trees and
crows peck for seed in the dead grass-
I hope they do not
unearth the teeth I’ve buried.

The hem of my dress is frayed, for all of the hours
spent in the ground has caught up to me.