Poetry as Tiny House
Blind Date
1957
Before take-off, stewardesses used to walk the aisles with trays of gum hung around their necks like nightclub cigarette girls in cartoons. Then, as the plane rose, we’d be pressed against our seats, chewing hard.
In those days, taking gum to school would get you sent home. Because something in it could set you free, to fly for hours and hours in the open air. And behavior like that was not to be allowed. Not I can still hear my teacher saying to herself as she red- penciled my papers Ever.
The Damaged Table
They’d been accumulating for years:
white circles outlining leaking cups,
pale splotches left by dishes carelessly
set down. At first, each injury to
what had once been bright-faced oak
left me feeling like my mother who,
in spite of her nightly resolutions,
had slapped me in the face again,
but when the lapses turned into
just one more, I stopped noticing.
Until the night arrived that I looked
into all those bleached faces and
asked myself how, over and over,
I could have caused such harm
and the answer slid right in,
as familiar as the thin line of light
under Mother’s door: I’ve become her.
As the Anesthesia Recedes
her fingers wake, one by one. At first, they think they’re fixed. They don’t yet realize how much they lost the morning after Ian when, admiring the way whites and blues piled on each other in the sky after he spared her and the ones she loved, she forgot the others he did not spare.
It was only a small branch tangled in Spanish moss but when she tripped on it, the sidewalk rushed up to meet her and her mouth filled with blood and her right wrist turned huge and sideways, and the thumb on the other hand sulky- purple and black. And no matter how hard she tried to stand up, she couldn’t.
Do you think you can get off the bed on your own? asks the recovery nurse, the perky one with the decaled nails. Damn straight I can she thought but didn’t say, and ever since that moment, every single time she tries to bend her wrist more deeply forward or force her fingers into a fist, she thinks it again.
¡ Basta !
Send the news through the fungi under the ground Beat the message out like tom toms Sing it like smoke For they are coming With their dozers and their axes and their saws and their machetes and their flatbeds and their teeth.
Tell your vines to trap their ankles your snakes to strike at them Scream such fearful songs through your leaves that they will cover their ears and run away.
Recruit the sky. Tell it to blacken over them. Tell it to send its bolts to fell them its winds to push them into piles like trees
And if all else fails, shake the ground until every root shivers and every forest creature lifts its head and bid the chaco chacalaca sing: Compadres. Comadres. They are almost here. Send. Jaguars.
Lola Haskins lives in Gainesville, Florida and Skipton, Yorkshire. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, the London Review of Books, London Magazine, The New York Quarterly, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, Rattle and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on NPR and BBC radio. She has published fourteen collections of poems, a poetry advice book and a non-fiction book about fifteen Florida cemeteries.
Ms. Haskins has been awarded three book prizes, two NEA fellowships, four Florida Cultural Affairs fellowships,the Emily Dickinson/Writer Magazine award from Poetry Society of America, and several prizes for narrative poetry. She retired from teaching Computer Science at the University of Florida in 2005 and served from then until 2015 on the faculty of Rainier Writers Workshop.
Learn more about Ms. Haskins, buy her books, see what she’s reading, and enjoy samples of her work.