Where It All Goes Down
There's not too much in "Hanging Fire" to clue us in about setting. The speaker talks about her room being too small for her, and her mom spending way too much time "in the bedroom / with the door closed," but we don't know too much else. The poem could be taking place in an apartment in New York City or in a mansion in Georgia. That's one of the cool things about "Hanging Fire": because it's not very specific, we can imagine it taking place anywhere. In other words, we are free to imagine that it relates to our own lives in a lot of different ways (including the setting). We see what you did there, Ms. Lorde, and we like it.