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What Made Me Do That to You
 
We watched laundry
in windowed steel machines,
the humid dryers’ air
weighing our eyelids down,
never closing
on the warped plastic chairs
with their curved
upward edges
 
took the sharp
needly point
of leaf
long and slender
 
in the aisles of second hand stores
dust rose from faded shades
of brown corduroy sofas.
Black and white TV screens
flipped continuously,
the horizontal always broken
though we twisted knobs
trying to watch reruns of Gunsmoke
 
chased you
sticking
the leaf-dart
in your shoulder
 
we lay on the floor
eyes turned from the afternoon
National Geographic animal shows 
staring at the air conditioner
unplugged, rusting
 
made you fall
on a brick
as if beat
and cornered
breaking
your collar bone.

Broken Glass
 
 
There’s been an accident,”
Daddy says.  “Did somebody
die?”  “I’m not sure.” 
Who was it?” 
 
Mom smiles crooked
when she sits.
I’ve had an accident.”
Did you fall down?”
No honey.  A traffic light
fell into my windshield.”
 
A wrecker
backs her car
into the driveway.
 
A dog’s mouth, rabid
from a raccoon bite
foams on TV.

Trestle Crossing 
 
 
Coal tar reek in August heat,
we watch carp and fronds weave
in water.  Dropped rocks move
so slow fish don’t care.  Dreams
of train whistles forcing
a thirty foot jump, or loping
the wooden tracks, tripping:
a train rush over us.  We find
flattened pennies other boys
forget to claim.  Cattails,
mosquito swarms in weeds,
spider webs between rocks,
thunder sounds at sundown. 
 
At home, heat lightening
and jitterbug huzzz.  Cats
eat moths by porch light,
and fire, fire against
the woods.  Walk the moonlit
grass, catch earth smells—
horse dung in collapsed barn stalls.
 
An Indian is buried here somewhere.







Copyright 2009, Ian Haight . © This work is protected under the U.S. copyright laws. It may not be reproduced, reprinted, reused, or altered without the expressed written permission of the author.



Ian Haight has been awarded translation grants from the Daesan Foundation, Korea Literary Translation Institute, and Baroboin Buddhist Foundation.  With Taeyoung HÅ, he is the co-translator of Borderland Roads: Selected Poems of Kyun HÅ (White Pine, 2009).  His poems, essays, and translations appear or are forthcoming in Barrow Street, Writer's Chronicle, and New Orleans Review.