Post-Partum

Touch my home. Touch my
walls and tablecloth and the coat I bought my son; he
will be a small blue boy, blue like paint,
and his round hands
spell out something like milk or salt.
I want him to sleep in the crook of an avocado.

 

Night breaks but does not open.
you are a beautiful woman
said the blue boy. Now, once he is here,
I see that he is blue
like an egg in the dark.
He leans in from a window that wasn’t
there before, kicking his toes against the wall
as he looks at the pink boy in the cradle.

 

Open this jar for me, I ask.
Our yarn has been cut, but open this jar for me:
see, it is filled with childhood and melted
plastic.

 

By Sofia Haines

Sofia Haines is a senior Creative Writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Tagged : / / / / / /

The Bear

He noticed that the salmon took a moment
to breathe a sigh of relief when he tore them from the water
(am I god? he asked)
and thought he heard a wheeze of joy
from the snap of bones between his teeth.

The bear has prophetic dreams on nights
that are so hot that
he cannot swallow water. He sees a beer can
bent in half like a man shot in the stomach. The bear
becomes a vegetarian; he wakes in the morning to find
feathers stuck and bent between his claws.

There has been a question swinging in his ears like frayed rope.
He moves towards a nursery that pools
beneath the rocks a mile downstream. The bear reminds
himself to pray and thanks his mother and father for allowing
death a place to sleep at the dinner table.

 

By Sofia Haines

Sofia Haines is a senior Creative Writing major at Walnut Hill School for the Arts.

Tagged : / / / / / / /