Poetry by Ian Hall

Porchlight congratulates Ian Hall on the publication of his first book, Creekwater Mansions, just released by EastOver Press, and is proud to publish here three poems from that collection. Ron Rash, author of Serena and The Risen, and a Porchlight contributor, said, "The poems in Creekwater Mansions are big-hearted but never sentimental, always true to their time and place. Nevertheless, what I admire most is the sheer 'aliveness' of the language, the unanticipated words or similes that reward multiple readings. I doubt a better debut book of poetry will be published this year."

IAN HALL was born and reared in the coalfields of Southeastern Kentucky. He holds an MFA from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, and he is currently a PhD candidate in English at Florida State University. He appeared on Narrative Magazine’s ‘30 Below 30’ list, and he was named the winner of the 2025 Princemere Poetry Prize, as well as the co-winner of the Kentucky State Poetry Society’s 2025 Grand Prix Contest, and the runner-up of the 2025 Vivian Shipley Poetry Award. He was named a finalist for the 2024 X.J. Kennedy Prize, the 2024 Tennessee Williams Poetry Prize, and the 2025 Red Wheelbarrow Poetry Prize. His work is featured in numerous publications, including Narrative, Mississippi Review, The Journal, and American Literary Review. He lives in Tallahassee, Florida.

Swiftly Tilting Planet

After Krzysztof Kieślowski
The problem
with a poet’s equilibrium: I keep falling
in love.

Sonnet for the Preachiest Loop in My Belt

Round midnight
the plushbellied men—their vitals
fetched up in flak jackets
of saturated fat—shrink cold-footed
into the pantry to make sandwiches
out of sidemeat & snotty aioli.

In the gaunt hills
a wolf—his muzzle done up
bloodmuddy from the moon
sweetened bowels of an old kill—hears
a lovemate croon
in cross-eyed hunger
& has naught to say
for himself.

Lastward

In the nursing home I was once
overing my papers
one more time: husbanding
the correspondence, diaries, & shaggy
miscellany into something
sage. In youth & young manhood, middle
age, I was an academic of the dead
languages. Latin, Esperanto, I gave
bulky lectures. I could make a single, lordly yawn
last the class period. My students, at this college of striving
kulaks, were daresome to tell me
that the hour had passed. It was almost time

for pudding & pills, & the ragged welding
of my own cursive started
to make my eyes run
tepid. I thought O dear: these
are the motheaten, back-attic ruminations of a man
in wane. Where is the bloodthrum, the red
yawp? With sprained vision, I went over
them again—each letter, a little
kinked corpse. Of a sudden, I was palsied
by doubt. The orderlies had to tote me
to my communal table for snack. & as I sat
there, envying the thick skin

on my tapioca, the uncertainty started
to go through me
like an intestinal virus. What of my sole
tome? If these long shepherded
logs of mine, which I’d hoped might give
scope & bookend
to my twilight, just amounted to the lax
sphincterings of the bedridden, then what
of my spindly oeuvre? The only book
I’d published: a study of the yearning

syrup of the Appalachian idiom. It aimed
to atomize every hair
trigger utterance. To encompass all
the rawboned poise. Some doleful critic called it
flabby. & I’ll admit it had some undue
heft, stretch marks
from all the chitlin & frybread
fed musing. But I wanted it to give the whole
motion: the charred kinesis of a coon
hunt at midnight—hounds with fetus-colored tongues
aloll, men whoop-drunk
around a campflame—& the ceaseless power

& telephone wire strung pole to pole
like wonky sutures. The cankered
poetry they relay. Squinting back through
my uncollected work, it dawned on me
what’s absent: the judgeless
tangle of hick talk. It’s all gone
nasal. Dull & unsalted—a rhetorical
casserole. If you went by the
bromides in my journal, the decade
prior was just regimented
languish. Ten dim years through
lined only by the funk

of bedsore salve, bureaucratically approved
mush. Studying haught, I’d lost all contact
with the ardenthearted. In that cafeteria, I realized
I was in the foggiest hills
of enfeeblement. Soon, I’d be vacant
minded, a gurgling nag
of bones. Then & there, at a table
full of professional droolers, I decided I wanted to go out
doing something un-annullable. To use the last morsel
of my wits…getting senseless. That night, after sleeptime
medicine, I crept to the home’s dingiest wing—

where they boarded the wards
of the county. I woke Stacy, a short-winded
indigent from Lookout Mountain who fermented
busthead hooch in his handicap
friendly commode. He came to
gape-lipped, awry of larynx, breathing red
static. His lungs sounded
soldered. But there was this nutty welling
of tears at the corner
of his crow’s feet when he saw the two softshell
packs of Winston Lights I had. Next morning, at shift
change, in the backmost common room, the aides

found a duo in Daniel
Boone costumes, the snoring
coals of a fire upkept with pages
from peer-reviewed journals. Half
a blackened pet rabbit billowing
from a greenwood spit. & Sweet
Ruination written in thumbtacks on the corkboard
amongst the lunch menus & bingo digest. The coroner
said that those two graybeards died of a hangover
that ought to be hanging in a museum.