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It’s not her elytra,
glittery and hard,
but the second, delicate pair
of wings they conceal,
folded along artful veins,
that when it’s time
will open and carry her.
Copyright © 2019 Lola Haskins. Used with permission of the author. This poem originally appeared in The Southern Review, Winter 2019.
St. Augustine Light shafts down on the assembled congregation of sails billows my shirt sends me to where thin countries stretch like needles to a low and distant shore from which suddenly canoes appear
I'm crossing the river where it narrows, carefully, it being Sunday and I'm past the root end of the log when I look up, and there's a haunt sitting on the blossom end. I can see trumpet vine and blackberries through her white dress. Gnats hang in the air. The river runs, red-brown and deep. The haunt sings and it's my music, the blood song of my heart and bones and my skull dancing in the road. And Chloe, she knows my name. She says Oh Patsy, take care, or you will surely fall and the thick river&
He is rid away to the tenant farms and I take up my pen to list the shakings-out and openings. And my thin letters lean as sails that, though driven, cannot arrive. May the ninth, I write. And: Mrs. Ferguson. Unbutton the bed pillows and plump them to the air. Then: Take the curtains down and with your broom unseat the spiders' webs.