Shannon Hardwick

For a spell like fireball, the target is the point in space where the ball of fire erupts

How could I think I held onto
the wounds but not the hunger 

to avenge them? The body already knows
each spell by name, each new 

daughter wrapped in a ball of my own hair
I wake chewing 

in the snowfields. The birch trees peel.
I snap two arrows, turn 

toward the firepit I kindled, no longer
dormant, now burning.

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Shannon Hardwick's work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Gulf Coast Journal, Salamander, South Dakota Review, Plume Poetry Journal, The Texas Observer, Four Way Review, The Missouri Review, Sixth Finch and Passages North, among others.