haiku #4
squeeze your soft belly
head on your chest, as always
our breathing gets synced
i dreamed of winter fire
and woke up drowned
in summer sweat.
the heat was real, i know it.
i felt it, but like January
instead of June.
i saw the flame leap up angry
out of the woodstove.
i caught a noxious whiff
of singed, stray hairs.
a slip of paper smoldered
in amongst the ashes.
i recognized my chicken scratch
and your incendiary name.
i woke up drowned in summer sweat
but couldn’t stop the cold chill
sliding down my slick spine.
the machinations of finer things befuddle me.
I do not appreciate jazz.
and quell the beast that I know lurks-
waiting for me to sbow a piece of tender flesh.
or be conversant in military history-
a lot.
Hate begets hate and you beget me and
how many times in our nine months of knowing
have I answered a question with
the words because I know you?
I know you, not anymore because we
haven’t talked in weeks except
the occasional desperately cheery text
message that can be described as nothing more than
coordination
Can you imagine? Coordinating
with someone you’ve loved so much on
a rooftop that the idea of an electric death didn’t
even scare you.
I think I will run into you one
day at an Alabama gas station five hundred
miles from anywhere either of us should be and
we will look at each other and say
simultaneously,
holy shit.
I
The red-shirted child screams
while in the darkness
of the photograph.
I cannot hear her.
II
We do not see their faces
in the sanctioned photographs.
They do not want us to see
ourselves.
III
The memory of my grandmother
pointing out the photograph
of her brother-in-law
in his Nazi uniform. She said
he was required to join.
IV
The flames devoured the paper
on which the photographs
were printed.
Thank god for the negatives.
My body betrayed me.
Allowed pain into my bloodstream
Shut off all the safety switches
Now we’ve been compromised.
It tells me there’s a fire below
So I open up the windows and try to signal for help
It tells me there’s ice above
So I duck and cover
It pulls all the alarms and panics in its own chaos
And When the dust settles
I expected a sinister virus to have started this sickness
But I find nothing but my own body to blame.
Twenty-six in a Fishbowl Year
My mother makes her own two-layer birthday cake
and I am hanging around with the others for the spoon,
the bowl or one of the beaters to lick.
I ask how old she is—all I know
is that she is older and taller than me.
She says twenty-six
and I can imagine twenty-six but not
twenty-six years old—she is so old. I wonder
how it will feel to be twenty-six
someday. But the year I turn
twenty-six, I confuse myself.
Going through a divorce
and moving my little ones
a hundred miles away, I think twenty-
seven all year long. Totally miss twenty-six.
Melva Sue Priddy
Heartbreak
a blurry mess
coping like nailing
a tear to a wall
as countless fall
trying but failing
at very best
nightmare, Wake!
