Christine Hamm is a PhD candidate in English Literature, specializing in
20th century poetics. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook
Competition with her manuscript, Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her
poetry has been published in The Adirondack Review, Pebble Lake Review,
Women's Studies Quarterly, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle,
and many others. She has been nominated 3 times for a Pushcart Prize, and
she teaches English at CUNY. The Transparent Dinner, her book of poems, was published by
Mayapple Press in 2006 and her second book, Saints & Cannibals, came
out in March 2010. Christine is the editor of the anthology, Like a Fat
Gold Watch: creative/critical works inspired by Sylvia Plath.
Christine Hamm
Getting Over
I keep his cigarette butts in my cereal bowl
on the kitchen table
next to the bottle of wine he drank.
It's become an acrid shrine to forgetting you.
A toast to his teeth gentle on my ribs,
to his thumb beckoning inside me
until you were just
healed bruises and
fingerprints.
It's
a souvenir of his whispered
questions, my answers always
yes, yes,
with the breath of
a woman who has run a long way
to get to this place.
Previously Published by ECLECTICA and in The Transparent Dinner
"Lordy, can I relate." Anna Weaver, Cary, North Carolina
