Tuesday, August 4, 2020

Hailey Higdon : Four poems




Something To Do With Our Bodies


overhead
the eagle swung
circles round
our placemats
a stillness
to lunch
it was a big
job, finding remedy
relatively technical to stay
clean, flow charts and all
then to get it out of one’s system
the wastebasket liner, the toothbrush, the Thursday
the marching in place
on a Thursday
just to have something good
to do with our bodies




How To Cook the Counter Talk and Other Dreams


lady try         girl tell me             
how to cook
the counter-talk of a dream
where I am always losing a competition
not clear on what’s missing from my performance
we’re all prisoners while we sleep
we’re all some baby
we don’t slide
awake without the force
of a greater slope              still the microscopic
fleas who live on your back
are happy     they feast until the air is thin and disappear            
in this large
collectively magnetized frequency        
          where one sound is discrete from another      purely
by our own agreement     
it’s the choice that put
possession with a thing
my other dreams stuck in the crook of gloves
unrealized    instead I know how
to be a gift    a fruit to someone who is craving
or just enough to feed a stranger
I’ve already been to the doctor to heal my dreams
told that a constellation all my own
lives in the yellow specs of
imagined matter in my intestines
told to go outward give
my galaxy telescope and I don’t
instead I wake
bury my coat
under the mile
line where that
touchdown once brought
me joy                    and then suggest that the standard
sheet and bed cover are enough
to envelop what’s left of me




Earth Poem


let me tell you a name
otherwise unfinished
still has might
the cedar wakes whole
but it’s an exception
hosts of broken accounts
missing coastal cliffs
missing volcanoes, currents
giant and deep
and at dinner desire wasn’t
physical for you
it was a once preached
tale of a thumb pinching
green grass, I have to say, it’s your
name that ought to salt
cannon powder like no other




Why


because pride was
an accompaniment
to a bicyclist, craned
up road facing, not
stopping for a damn
sip of water or energy
drink, a life motive
and my sofa, not unique,
masterfully holds me
a thief collecting
pennies from full
pockets of change






Hailey Higdon’s debut poetry collection, Hard Some, is available from Spuyten Duyvil Press. She is the author of several small press chapbooks including A Wild Permanence (Dancing Girl, 2018) and Rural (Drop Leaf, 2017). She is preoccupied with real and imagined inter-connectedness. Her work explores the ways we construct belonging—to the self, one’s community, the world of objects and in the natural world. She has work forthcoming in Ruminate, The Burnside Review, and The Spectacle. Find her online at haileyhaileyhailey.com.