(PROSE POETRY)

APERTURE

​CHAD HANSON

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Cody happened upon a god-shaped hole. He keeps falling through it on his walk home from the hotel where he works as a concierge. On one such trip he meets a woman with a pair of binoculars. She’s found a peregrine. Cody steps up and asks, “Can I see?” She hands him the glass, but then she tells him: “Be careful.” She says, “It’s hard not to become a bird of prey.” Cody understands what she means. He says, “Yeah. Really. The craving alone, right?” She says, “A bird is a hole. It’s the kind of hole through which any of us can pass,” but Cody doesn’t hear her. He has already burrowed into the sky. 

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Chad Hanson serves as Chair of the Department of Social & Cultural Studies at Casper College. His nonfiction titles include, Swimming with Trout (University of New Mexico Press, 2007) and Trout Streams of the Heart (Truman State University Press, 2013). He is also the author of two collections of poems: Patches of Light (Red Dragonfly Press, 2014) and This Human Shape (Red Dragonfly Press, 2016). His recent awards include the Meadowhawk Prize in Poetry and a Creative Writing Fellowship from the Wyoming Arts Council, made possible through funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. For more information, visit: www.chadhanson.org.