Honey on the Road//Harrison Hamm

June, flooding the foyer. Heart-rag, wrung into a bucket of paint—pink as scraped knees. Massacre on the dogwood stairs. My god, I’m barefoot in the blood. You can’t even watch as faith—a bastard dog—limps out the door. Another mouth in someone else’s garage. Gutted voids where the eyes should be. Whispers like an auburn haze. Jupiter in the hills. Honey-drip sky. The evening blooms into burnt hydrangea. A pillar of fire follows me out. My lie. Your crutch. We have the same hands. Dragonflies. Maybe grace. A secret letter written in mist on the window. My old bus out of town. All I have: a leaking bottle of dusk. That sticky ink. Didn’t you know summer would beetle down my back? Thicket thorns, see:

Between me and you—leeches in the grass.
My feet, still bare.
That door, never quite shut.

You hide. Maybe pray. Like a moth under glass.
A ghost without pearls. Only strings.
Ropeburn, dripping from your neck.
Give my eyes back. As if I couldn’t see in the dark.
The night is a backseat lover, purpled deep into collarbone.
First bite of an oozing plum. Listen when I say, Lick the knife clean.

News of a trainwreck in Louisiana. Only two survivors. You swear the Lasik makes you cry, but in this hazel hour, that creek down the road—I can trace it on your face—all the way back to the porch you first doubted God on. I promise if we make it, I’ll tell you what I saw that night you hung blue from the doorway:

the horizon
melting
to the darkest shade of your name.

Father held you by the leash.
And you held the door open.

Harrison Hamm (@harrisonhamm) is a poet, screenwriter, and essayist originally from rural Tennessee, now based in Los Angeles. A 2023 Filmmaker's Workshop Fellow with New York Stage and Film and a 2022 Fellow in Diverso's The Minority Report, his writing can be found at his website harrisonhamm.com or published/forthcoming in LA Miscellany, Rising Phoenix Press, Broken Antler, and more.