Haibun: $7 Chapbook
The old, no-named poet, asks her to stop and buy his chapbook.
He sits behind his card table in front of the bookstore that will never carry him “…because an algorithm at headquarters decides all the books we can sell., I am just the store manager and have no say.”
He asks with sincerity if she would be so kind. She feels his gaze and just knows he can write poems as answers to her ambiguous and unformed questions.
She passes her five and two ones and he asks her name.
These pauses, like this one as he signs her copy are no longer filled with her fingers pecking and pushing at her phone’s hardened screen, no longer filled with having to do something; but instead, filled with her fingers still, her breath measured, and just watching what is around her. No need to drink her water, she isn’t thirsty, so she continues to just watch.
Giving her her new purchase, he asks, “Will you read it, I mean, really read it?” Looking into his eyes the way a boy jumps into the lake for his first swim of the summer—earnestly and without want of any guard—she says “yes. Yes I will.”
She starts off with commitment her step and zest, zest her gate.
crow drinking water
as stones drink warmer, hotter.
air, too, steeps the heat
He sits behind his card table in front of the bookstore that will never carry him “…because an algorithm at headquarters decides all the books we can sell., I am just the store manager and have no say.”
He asks with sincerity if she would be so kind. She feels his gaze and just knows he can write poems as answers to her ambiguous and unformed questions.
She passes her five and two ones and he asks her name.
These pauses, like this one as he signs her copy are no longer filled with her fingers pecking and pushing at her phone’s hardened screen, no longer filled with having to do something; but instead, filled with her fingers still, her breath measured, and just watching what is around her. No need to drink her water, she isn’t thirsty, so she continues to just watch.
Giving her her new purchase, he asks, “Will you read it, I mean, really read it?” Looking into his eyes the way a boy jumps into the lake for his first swim of the summer—earnestly and without want of any guard—she says “yes. Yes I will.”
She starts off with commitment her step and zest, zest her gate.
crow drinking water
as stones drink warmer, hotter.
air, too, steeps the heat
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| from & Haiku |
