I guess wherever a man stands becomes the moral high ground, less about altitude, more conviction, boots on ground, the cool rational marble of thought, they hate gossiping too, or at least what we call that way of living in the world when women do it, which of course makes it wrong, you get it, they don’t understand the need for it, emotionally of course, but also biologically, survival skill, instinct, I need to know what’s happening to the fifty or so people in my world, hunt love, gather grief, I want to know and I want the privilege of being told, secrets whispered under low lights, over popcorn and wet nails, shifting alliances, not always mean, no, but sometimes, sure, but we know where our lines are, we’ve been tip-toeing around lines in the sand our whole lives, were trained in it, our lives are lived exclusively on the knife thin line between victimhood and power, Madonna and Whore, all of them, the big ones, the little ones thin as thread, frail as uncooked spaghetti, and we’re towing some lines and smudging others, and you can’t see it yet because you’re not a part of it.

We’ve been cutting our
toes on sharp river rock
since we were a foot tall

I’m sorry, but this isn’t yours. Pieces of it aren’t mine either, but I’m feeling for those spaces, rocks underwater, I know where my feet are because  I’m always watching them, the ground, my back. I know you’ve felt it, searing and pain, but not this kind. Not this. The taste was less mixed, had to be, than this bittersweet oxymoron daily pain of being alive and moving in certain bodies, so I need you to let me rewild without mapping the edges or soft spots, making your good everybody’s. God of running water knows that men who have tried to canonize life, sort it into laws and religions, have only scratched up the earth trying to write it down with cement, wire,  ink, and maggots. I need you to stop looking for the edges, okay? And let bad things happen. Bad things happen all the time, especially to us, right?

It was so sweet it
disgusted me and my heart
could not break the box

Do you know what I mean? I don’t think so, not as well as you think you do, and it’s rude of me to ask you to, knowing full well that it’s impossible. Oh well. It was worth a shot. No fault, just a simmering that needs to climax sometimes, let it happen. Don’t try to temper the edges of waterfalls or scold the river with a dam, you can’t police a rage that wasn’t made for you to feel, there’s violence in your vision of niceness. We’re already choking on it, fake smiles, polite words, the road rash of silent years.

the thunder rolls in,
takes a seat at the
table where it waits
its turn

We’ve all been the hero in the story, and we were all killed by a different outcome of you. Yes, killed, this isn’t hyperbole, it’s carbon dioxide, I have been wounded in ways I don’t use verbs for.

The foaming of the
sea’s mouth resembles the
sane beached on language’s
shore

You cannot explain to me the ways of good versus bad, tease them apart and place each in my hand like a parent offering their child a choice of toys, a flashlight in a  cave. You are not the keeper of logic, and I’d let you rot in that cold marble mausoleum of reasoning as I suck the marrow out of the core of the ugly, beautiful geode of Earth before I became ashamed of the driving force of my feeling and whim, the red-blooded fucking horse heart in the chest of me, those who were seen dancing, the beat of hooves you will never hear if you keep waiting for words to translate the sounds beneath.

And…when…the…rain
came…it…was…full…of
burning…and…no…one
made…it…out

– Virginia Laurie

Author’s Note: I was inspired by Japanese haibun, a prosimetric writing form consisting of prose followed by a related haiku, oft seen in travel writing. However, my take on haibun is very removed from the origins of the tradition and includes five discrete “haibun”, strung together like a sonnet cycle, meant to exhaust a line of thinking. In this case, I replace objective, descriptive prose with highly subjective language that contrasts the simplicity and serenity typically expected from a haiku. For this poem, I tapped into a lot of pent-up frustration and used this form to help center the voice between sections of spiraling, stream-of-consciousness prose. Whenever I felt the words slipping too far out of my grasp, I tried to reign them in with haiku. In doing so, this poem became a highly therapeutic exercise, meant to both indulge in and deplete residual anger.