Something To Do
With Our Bodies
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.
