BOATS By Harrison Hamm

The Rising Phoenix Review

June 19

BOATS

A thousand dark blues and there you were butterflying

— just as my hands had learned to paint you.
— just as I'd patchworked those bony shoulders from a spool of scrap footage.

You'll remember,
we broke in through the back gate popping goji and marionberry

like they were anything but fruit
— Indica's a good name, right?

Howls like gnarled branches screaming in the night wind—
Ha! yeah. Bloodsucker, bingo, bonanza, blackberry jam, Man—

As if the smoke rippled in knowing circles, and I
or what I could be, buried
inside the wet-dark of you

spinning beneath a starlit blade—

It's as though for whatever storm-smitten speck of mercy,

frost fell is still falling

like dust-scales from my eyes

even now—
even if one day I forget your voice—

that black ocean brining
from your chestlessness—

We were boys,
we were boats—

By Harrison Hamm

Biography:

Harrison Hamm (@harrisonhamm) is a queer, neurodivergent, and mixed-race poet and screenwriter originally from rural Tennessee, now based in Los Angeles. A 2023 Filmmaker's Workshop Fellow with New York Stage and Film, a 2022 Fellow in Diverso's The Minority Report, and a multi research grant recipient at his alma mater Loyola Marymount University, Harrison develops creative work and scholarship with a commitment to healing and surviving on the margins. Southern Gothic at his emo kid core, Harrison explores themes of grief, violence, faith, and the erotic, often turning to dreamlike and macabre aesthetics to express what so often can't be said out loud.