Issue Four - October 2008
Francesca Haig
Francesca Haig's poetry has appeared in Blue Dog, Overland and Famous Reporter and has been featured on Radio National’s Poetica. Her first collection of poetry, Bodies of Water (FIP, 2006) was highly commended in the 2007 Ann Elder Award. She has read her work at the Melbourne Writers Festival and Tasmanian Living Writers Week. She lectures in Creative Writing at The University of Chester, UK.
Dating a poet: a relationship in six stanzas
i. In making love we unmake words. Later, you take out your journal and reconstruct language under the strict tuition of your pen, while I make out the graffiti of your chest hair.
ii. The naked page. How the sound of your pen on paper is more intimate than any of the noises we made last night.
iii. You are a virtuoso: who knew so much could be done with syllables? Your daredevil tongue.
iv. You write only in free verse but, at night, the perfect pentameter of your sleeping breath.
v. I scour your words as I have read other men's faces, hands. In all your poems, as with photos, I seek myself out first to see how I look.
vi. I know your mouth is a fortune cookie. After three weeks I crack it open: on that slip of paper, your tongue, is her name.
Baghdad
Back in Texas, he understood perfectly the logic of soil. No good with letters or numbers, by nineteen he was fluent in the tangible language of dirt: planting time, the heavy satisfaction of a good rain. The places where clay makes the ground stubborn. Knots in the earth, snagging the plough's comb.
In Baghdad it's the soil that confounds him: how, west of the Green Zone, you could dig all day and never strike wet. How lightly the Tigris carries its silt load, while the sandstorms make the horizon sway like a cornfield.
Mud in the water, sand in the air.
Over here, he's betrayed by dirt, and what it grows: the sudden bloom of an explosion. The reliable crop of car bodies. Behind the burnt-out police van that row of heads, coming up like pumpkins.