– Home
– Issues
– Submit
– About

TPCReview Issue 002

Hannah Tool

Golden shovel after J. Mae Barizo’s “The Women”

“to know we were not the same women as before did not pain us.”

hands wrinkled and wringing, cling to
rungs winding in my blood, I ache to know
all these women within me. See what we
gathered up in puddles of what wept us, were
it black silt or stream or sun glint, not
flesh but cells climbing like morning glories up the
spiked stems of sun-gorged flowers. The same
sun burns my shoulders as the women
in fields and tents, at stakes and crosses, as
bees pile pollen on woolly legs before
rebounding home to honeyed hives, like them we did
what we could and fought not
to be sorrowed by what was left behind. Pain
a shape like small shoes shed in rubbled cities, blood that becomes us.

Hannah Tool is a Santa Cruz, CA educator, poet and parent whose poetry often finds itself preoccupied with memory and motherhood. She holds a B.A. in Writing and Rhetoric from UMass Dartmouth and an M.S. in Education from CSU East Bay. You can find her work in Scarlet, SUBMIT, Suburban Witchcraft Magazine and others. When not teaching or writing, she can be found wrist deep in dirt in the garden with her family.