Rangy

By Colette Tennant

Students get rangy
before a three-day weekend,
and someone just burned
popcorn in the lounge next door,
and hawks have been
boiling over our campus,
and I don’t like that word
for circling hawks.

Circumference of hawks would be better –
Emily Dickinson would have liked that.
I’ve seen hawks fly so high,
I think they’re nesting
near the headwaters of heaven.

Colette Tennant has two poetry collections: Commotion of Wings (2010) and Eden and After (2015), as well as the commentary Religion in the Handmaid’s Tale: a brief guide (2019). Her poem “Rehearsals” was awarded third by Billy Collins in the 2019 Fish Publishing International Writing Contest. Most recently, her poem was accepted by Eavan Boland for Poetry Ireland Review’s Issue 129. Her poems have appeared in Rattle, Prairie Schooner, Southern Poetry Review, and others.