Poems

Waiting for the Hurricane

Daddy says we have plenty of time
to get back to our car where he left my sisters,
and make it safely home. Don’t you want
to see a hurricane? He brags of tornadoes
he chased in his pickup on the farm,
of playing chicken with thunderheads in the war,
zigzagging his plane over an ocean angry
as the one we face alone on this empty beach…

Wake

Her Irish aunts tiptoe the house, stopping clocks,
draping glass, murmuring through her keyhole,
Cover your vanity, souls get lost in mirrors.

Cloistered in her room since they brought Father home,
she ignores plump-knuckled rapping on her locked door,
hushed pleas to eat food cooked by neighbors.

She refuses to alter her routine, lays out school uniform
and saddle shoes her father polished. She pirouettes
the dancer on the music box he gave her…

The Chicken Dinner Candy Bar

Our aunt’s new boyfriend motored
among the flat, reticent towns of central Indiana
in a ’58 Ford tricked out to look like a chicken.
Fashioned from sheet metal and fiberglass,
the giant hen roosted on the pick-up’s bed…

Our Secret

Daddy picks just me to be a Blackfoot, like him,
saying he’ll initiate me the way Indians did.
I follow him to the ravine, so deep it swallows trees:
only their green crowns show above our lawn.

Underbrush scratches my legs as I scramble,
stumbling on vines, alert for his shirt
flashing white, his boots snapping dry branches,
as we descend…

Escape

She wakes to light harsh as an interrogator’s,
and continuous shrieking, as if

some primordial bird roosted on the roof.
A flashlight sweeps her mattress, stops

on the vacant half—Are you alone? She drags
the bedspread up, trying to comprehend three men

dressed in yellow and black like giant hornets.
Your front door’s open, they inform her…

All works © Janis Harrington