soul food

Sleep Positions

This is how we sleep:
On our backs, with pillows covering our chests, heavy as dirt
On our sides, like wistful spoons
Clenched, knees in-tucked, arms folded
Wide, like sprawling-rooted lotuses.

In Iowa on pictures of Hawaii, huge white flowers on blue
In New York on black satin
In China on straw.

This is how our dreams arrive:
As hot yellow taxicabs
As sudden blazing steam, we who have been pots on a stove,
looking only at our own lids
As uninvited insects, all at once on our tongues.

O hairdresser, auditor, hard-knuckled puller of crab traps, you who
think poetry was school, you who believe you never had
a flying thought,
lie down.
--Lola Haskins, Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems
(read by the poet for the WSU Visiting Writer Series this evening)
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Love

She tries it on, like a dress.
She decides it doesn't fit
and starts to take it off.
Her skin comes, too.
--Lola Haskins, Desire Lines: New and Selected Poems
(poet's comment: "You can't write a poem called 'Love' until you're over a certain large age."
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"The truth is horizontal and vertical."