Awareness

BY Kimiko Hahn

Among the burrowing owl’s
scraps of carpet and tinfoil

tucked into the humid straw,
the hoard of cow dung is especially prized —

as it attracts dung beetles.

The owls watch for hours
revealing a tool of attraction

of which those clever creatures

may not be aware.
What then is awareness?

Connecting shit to consequence:
the flicker that links, say,

chlorine to climax —
or who consumed whom at faculty picnics.

 

Biography

KIMIKO HAHN is the author of eight books of poems, including: Earshot (Hanging Loose Press, 1992), which was awarded the Theodore Roethke Memorial Poetry Prize and an Association of Asian American Studies Literature Award; The Unbearable Heart (Kaya, 1996), which received an American Book Award; The Narrow Road to the Interior (W.W. Norton, 2006); and Toxic Flora (W.W. Norton, forthcoming 2010). She is a recipient of a number of fellowships and awards, such as the PEN/Voelcker Award, The Shelley Memorial Prize and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. She is a distinguished professor in the English Dept. and the MFA Program at Queens College, The City University of New York. Her poems in Cerise Press were inspired by and in some cases quoted from the science section of The New York Times.

Related

 

Printed from Cerise Press: http://www.cerisepress.com

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