On Outage by Chera Hammons
by Allison Hedge Coke
Hi. I’m Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, here for Poets on the Plains. Coffee’s on the table and I’m sharing a poem with you by another Panhandle poet, Chera Hammons from Amarillo, whose work is well-published and recognized with a PEN Texas Southwest Book Award in Poetry and the Texas Institute of Letters–Helen C. Smith Memorial Award.
Her most recent collection, Salvage List, is available through Belle Point Press. A fifth collection, Birds of America, is forthcoming in 2026 through The Dial Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Her debut novel is also available through Torrey House Press.
Hammons lives on the “windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle” where she writes poetry representative of the beauty, abundance, and power of the natural world, inclusive of the often-strange practices and habits of humans within it. Parallel realities with disparate complexities present as eased invocations calling us to consider dynamics within; where we’ve been, what damage we’ve done, where we go from here. All the while she sings us into place and space, inviting us to shuffle-step along the ever-unfolding parameters and perimeters she calls home.
Here is an exceptional poem of her’s:
Outage
Suddenly we live in a house that doesn’t hum,
on a barren street of dark houses blank and towering,
abandoned bulwarks backlit by the glow
of a city miles away across dark fields.
The walls become thin against the night—
the air within and without, the same temperature.
Drywall divides us from the children of wolves.
When a light goes out, what becomes of the light?
Does it disappear, the way we do?
The well gives no water if the pump can’t run.
The electric fences can’t hold the horses in.
When my father, who lives half an hour away,
hears that our power has gone out,
he tells me again the story of two peregrines
which had been courting in the wind over his roof,
how they landed together on a telephone pole,
sparked an arc and thunder,
and fell to the ground side-by-side, dead.
The house had no electricity for hours after that.
What could bear to keep going, after that?
Our neighbors are slowly vanishing.
An old vessel finally tumbles from its place in the stars.
Tonight, we cancel our plans. We peel oranges
by lantern light. We shine flashlight beams
on the ground before we step there.
We remember the taper candles and matches
that wait in the kitchen drawer that we almost never open.
Listen: the dog barks and barks, inconsolable.
Something unfathomable is happening outside.
What I want is what happened to the peregrines.
Not the singed feathers, the earth-tilting stillness,
but a love that takes the lights out with it when it goes.
The kind of loss that will be recounted over
and over again in the dark.
Chera Hammons “Outage”https://www.cherahammons.com/chera.h.miller@gmail.com Photo by Daniel Miller Poem “Outage” Credit 1st published in Rattle, May 4, 2025
https://rattle.com/outage-by-chera-hammons/
Outage opens out of sync, into discomforting disquiet. An audience invitational ‘we’ allows us to be a part of the shared space (home), now out of juice and kicking into an unexpected, near-noir scene where Hammons makes anything suddenly plausible in the unveiling.
We are unprotected here and left to elements, despite the architectural surrounding. The scene calls us to ponder reality, to move into theory and beyond, back to functionality and humanness. Parallel value continues with an idiom and literal aftermaths of losing power when electricity is the mode of operation for everything around us, including electric fences which are now failing what they can no longer contain. (Here, horses.)
We move into what seems to be a more comforting realm, to the speaker’s father, “who lives half an hour away” until what wisdom he has to offer delivers more peril; oddities of the natural world and electricity beyond the wired. What is shared is a tale familiar in their family, of two courting peregrines whose positionally summon “arc and thunder” and are electrocuted, falling “side-by-side, dead.” And everything shuts down. Nothing can run normally after such a shock. (Pun intended.)
This anecdotal sharing changes everything in the poem, despite long-term familiarity to the recipient. We instantaneously find the speaker’s neighbors “vanishing,” and everything left askew, here on earth, and above in constellations.
Until reason is met, plans canceled, oranges peeled “in lantern light” and walks taken with flashlights (instead of streetlamps). The people of the place remember that their candles and matches are prepared for such a use. And while the people begin to find themselves again, the dog remains inconsolable in the dark strangeness.
I love the poem’s completing couplet, recognizing how love lost spurns memory, recollection and repeating, perhaps through generations, all to make some mad sense of current and cause and what is too powerful and too beautiful to bear. The respite closure.
I’m such a fan of Hammons ‘work and it’s a pleasure to share this with you today.
Thank you for being with us for Poets on the Plains. I’m Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, a Panhandle-born poet, a place where you might still locate Hedge Coke Pass on a map, a preferred riding route of a grandfather of mine.
POETS ON THE PLAINS HOST
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke was born in Amarillo, lived/worked in seven High Plains states, and four more Great Plains states and provinces. She lives and works in California, came of age in North Carolina, and has also lived/worked in Hawai‘i, New Mexico, Michigan, New York, Tennessee and Georgia. She’s authored and edited 18 books including Look at This Blue: an assemblage poem and Burn (written at Marfa during the 2011 fires). Acknowledgements include the Thomas Wolfe Prize & Lecture, California Legacy Artist, the George Garrett Award, Fulbright Scholar, the First Jade Nurtured Sihui Female International Foreign Poetry Award, a U.S. Library of Congress Witter Bynner fellowship, and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters. She teaches for the University of California Riverside. Books: https://hedgecoke.com
FEATURED POET
Chera Hammons is a winner of the 2017 PEN Southwest Book Award through PEN Texas and the 2020 Helen C. Smith Memorial Award through the Texas Institute of Letters. She holds an MFA from Goddard College and formerly served as writer-in-residence at West Texas A&M University. Her work, which is rooted in love for the natural world, appears in Baltimore Review, Pleiades, Poetry, Rattle, The Southern Review, The Sun, The Texas Observer, and elsewhere. She lives on the windswept prairies of the Texas Panhandle. In her free time, she enjoys reading, birdwatching, spending time with her horses and donkeys, and caring for her houseplant collection, which is slowly but surely taking over her entire living space.Her most recent books include Salvage List from Belle Point Press and the upcoming Birds of America coming in 2026 from Dial Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House). https://www.cherahammons.com/
