Heather Hanlon

CONTACT:
Email: hsheetshanlon@gmail.com  

BIO:
Heather loves to talk art, poetry, and creative projects. She believes that process is just as important as product and is interested in how creative practice and engagement can be a form of healing.

Her career as a museum professional is a practice ground for guiding engaging experiences rooted in community. Her poetry practice also informs this experiment and she enjoys storytelling with a bit of the magic and mystery of family, the supernatural, and nature. Working with sound, forms, new forms, and editing is generative for Heather, as is reading and running.

She has been a member of WFOP for four years and studied creative writing at UW-Madison as one of the majors within her Bachelor's degree. She received her Master's in Art History, Museum Studies from UW-Milwaukee in 2020 and has had both poetry and art historical articles published in journals, zines, and for exhibitions. She lives in Sheboygan with her husband Mike and her baby, Violet, as well as a menagerie of pets.

She won first place in WFOP’s 2022 Kay Saunders Emerging Poet Contest for her poem “Dreams.”

You can listen to her 2022 "Poetry on Air" interview with Sheboygan Poet Laureate Lisa Vihos here.

Poetry

Dogwoods in Spring

Wash wash the blood at your stitches.
All tissues and bandages,
”Your father is all finished.”

I drive you home. We watch watch
the fog lift up from the lake,
”Warm air over cold water,” you named.

You told the officer she reminded you
of your “faraway daughter.” She said her name,
We shared shared the name.

That ditch ditch so near my house
and then our hot burning subject,
we still couldn’t name.

This small crash crash
a quiet reminder,
our last name.

White flower blossoms push pushing
over red branches, petals snow down
from the dogwood onto your porch.

I make sandwiches that we won’t eat.
In front of us, you’ve switched switched on
the NASA channel.

You ask me the question question,
shh shh
shh shh

Such such a pink in the powdery blue cosmos on TV,
like the color of the fog carried from the sunset and
I’m sorry.

And I’ve never been so sorry
and the blood on your chin
and the wash wash of the red.

And I hold your hand
and you hold mine
and we can be a family.

Published in Bramble Literary Magazine, Fall 2022.

Dreams

There is a Ghost Shepherd that comes in my dreams
the face: Missing. Can I pray to God in dreams?

It’s illegal to harbor you, runaway.
In my roof I hear you sleepwalk and pin dreams.

The bulb burned out when I prayed for you in bed;
an angel band plays in my filament dreams.

Not all of what is hidden on top will stay.
The truth will fall as weight grows heavy in dreams.

How have I been deceived in place and in time?
We would meet beneath the steeple and spin dreams.

We tossed the rock through the angel’s stained glass heart;
in the sanctuary the stone weeps, then dreams.

Have I been baptized with only dream water?
Which were my crimes and penance only in dreams?

There is no separate pillager or poet,
I dream when I ruin, and ruin in dreams.

How can I shake the dust off my feet? My eyes,
drowsy and my feet cannot begin dreams?

Did the Ghost Shepherd shake my dust off His feet?
Or, on the Sabbath, is there a faceless Heather in His dreams?

Awarded First Place in the Kay Saunders Emerging Poet category of Wisconsin Fellowship of Poet's Triad Contest, 2022. See judges and poet's commentary here.