Brianna Noll
Hearsay
In the last shudder
of an aching year
voices clamor to be
heard to say what
anxious flowers
in the locus of defeat
and hope. The artists
say beauty makes
fear tremble makes
the earth imperceptibly
hitch. The ladies on the
coasts say your lettuces
and your swans say
everything about your
inner life. The ladies
in the heartland say
it’s your petri dishes
and your cultures
that do all the talking.
Somewhere an electronic
voice says you are
the experience
and somewhere
else another
electronic voice
says you are a
shell of a person
beautiful and millennial
pink. When the leaders
say boys will be boys
will be heard these
are the times when
an imposter can say
they love you truly
and you do not
hesitate to believe them.
Brianna Noll is the author of The Era of Discontent, forthcoming from Elixir Press in 2021, and The Price of Scarlet (University Press of Kentucky, 2017), which was named one of the top poetry books of 2017 by the Chicago Review of Books. She is poetry editor of The Account, which she helped found, and her poems and translations have appeared widely in journals, including the Kenyon Review Online, The Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Crazyhorse and Waxwing. She lives in Los Angeles.