Featured Poetry: "Winter Funeral" by Elizabeth Hazen
Fully embracing what the lyric mode does best, Hazen provides the readers with brief, intense poems that preserve a suspended moment in time, attempting to record the thought processes and emotions of the speaker much like tree rings reveal drought, heat, and age. With astonishing clarity and concision, Hazen explores the mysteries of our realities—which are ultimately beholden to entropy. —Charlotte Pence, Kenyon Review
Winter Funeral
The embouchure opens to the unknown
of ocean, the horizon’s deceptive line.
It unfolds to plain, the lowest point
rising to action, unraveling grasses,
dirt, invisible distance. It presses
an estuary of breath through pursed lips,
tensed cheek and jaw, a practiced tongue.
We have heard this all before. One needs
structure to produce proper notes.
Cold intensifies error. My father
clasps his trumpet in his coat, warms up
the muscles in his face. Valves can only
do so much. Even the heart, pumping
faithfully, grows tired, but no note breaks,
no rest lingers in this space between breath
and music, this plot and what comes next.
Elizabeth Hazen is a poet and essayist whose work has appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Southwest Review, The Threepenny Review, The Normal School, and other journals. She earned her bachelor’s degree from Yale and her master’s from The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins. She teaches English at Calvert School in Baltimore, Maryland. Chaos Theories is her first book.
More From Elizabeth Hazen
Lessons From a Turtle by Elizabeth Hazen Once at the National Zoo, I watched a pair of giant tortoises copulating, the sound that emanated from their habitat like a sleeper’s distress in the midst of a confusing dream. My son wondered what the matter was. All of the children wondered, the older ones with a […]
Waiting for Maxwell’s Demon by Elizabeth Hazen My father is a geophysicist. As a child, I spent many hours on road trips to remote quarries where we would hike to an outcrop and spend hours splitting rocks, searching for fossils. While in retrospect I am grateful for these unique experiences, my younger self – and […]
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