Lola Haskins’ ninth book of poems, Still the Mountain, is forthcoming from Paper Kite in Spring 2010. Before that, her most recent collections were The Rim Benders (Anhinga) and Desire Lines, New and Selected Poems (BOA). A prose effort, Wild Angels: Fifteen Florida Cemeteries, is forthcoming from the University Press of Florida, also in 2010. Her two previous books of prose, Not Feathers Yet: A Beginner’s Guide to the Poetic Life and Solutions Beginning with A (fables about women, with images by Maggie Taylor) were published in 2007 by Backwaters Press and Moderbook, respectively. Her poetry has appeared in The Atlantic, The Christian Science Monitor, The London Review of Books, London Magazine, Georgia Review, Prairie Schooner, The New York Quarterly and elsewhere, as well as having been broadcast on BBC and NPR. Among her awards are the Iowa Poetry Prize (for Hunger, University of Iowa Press, 1993), the Emily Dickinson Prize from the PSA, and two NEAs. For more information, please see her website www.lolahaskins.com.
---------
It
Not-its cross in the air like twilight bats. The slowest counts to ten, her face hidden in her hands. And what when she finishes? Will she part the azaleas one by one, finding only pink wilted trumpets there? Will she crawl under the empty house, where wasps lie hatching in their paper tunnels? Will she cast door-shaped light into the tool shed? Will she persist until she stalks the cherry bush as her friend holds his flowered breath? Will she lift a step to find her webby sister? Will she creep around the woodpile to spot her brother, curled behind precarious logs? Or will she go instead to her room under the eaves? Does she know what she has? Does she know she can make them hide forever?
What Seeps in Slowly Through a Life, like Ink
When, in seventh grade, Susan Buresh called me a copycat because the girl with the umbrella
I was drawing in the margin of my notebook was the one on Morton Salt, I felt small.
At twelve, I knew that artists never copied. Now what I know instead is that I want to copy well.
I want to copy the baby throwing books over her shoulder until she finds the one about the moon.
I want to copy the look in your eyes when you hear our son play the guitar.
I want to copy the few moments light slants over the tops of the oaks before the afternoon is gone.
I used to think I could own the disheveled violets by the barn, the winds on Skipton Moor, D’Arcy at five naming herself South Carolina, Django at three, crowding her away from the mike.
But now I know that I may only copy them. My brush-tip quivers as it dips into the dark ink.
The pictures I like best do not easily dry. Sometimes they stay wet for years.