Hayley Mitchell Haugen

Exhaustion

­­-­-after Eduardo C. Corral’s “Lines Written During My Second Pandemic,” an imitation

All my stars blink out in exhaustion.
Exhaustion is a thirsty dog, an empty bowl.
You can’t reason with exhaustion like a lover.
Exhaustion is a fire consuming the body’s parched earth.
Entombed in my bones, exhaustion’s an ancient artifact.
It’s futile to whip exhaustion with a switch.
The heartiest creatures scurry around exhaustion.
I lay a cool sheet over the warm day of exhaustion.
In some countries, exhaustion is maligned.
Thorns protrude from the spindly legs of exhaustion.
Like the tides, exhaustion ebbs, exhaustion flows.
Exhaustion lurks behind corners, waiting to snatch a purse.
In middle age, exhaustion commands the room.
Scouring through tomes of exhaustion, eyelids droop.

 

Somewhere a Heart is Beating

The former president gets shot in the ear,
a graze, really, an annoyance he swats
away like a bite from a summer mosquito.
Eight shots ring out and the threat

is neutralized—just another newscast not
about guns, our right to inflict and protect.
This is about politics and mental illness,
not about parents who buy assault rifles

for twenty-year-olds. Donald ducks,
and I come up thirty-one years in the past,
barely able to catch my breath, crumpled
in my mother’s hallway over the news

of a bullet—1993, in an America with fewer guns,
pre-Paduca and before Columbine, but still,
where it only takes one gun, a single shot
to make a large man fall out of his shoes,

or to fell a friend on a bicycle refusing
to give it up to teenage street punks. Shot
in the brainstem, a coward’s bullet piercing
just as deeply as a hero’s. The ex-prez will live,

and somewhere a heart is beating,
my friend’s bravado gifting strangers new life:
his organs pumping, his corneas seeing,
his supple skin stretched across the bones

of another. Without guns,
who could have saved these people?
Without assassination attempts, what ever
could remind us of our divisiveness?

The Kitchen

begins in dark brown crosshatch wallpaper
stained with the grease of ages. The mother arrives
from out of state to help peel off the layers,
to give her daughter a fresh space to get ready
for the remodel – $8,000, but they have to keep
the soffit that won't be popular in two years,
keep the white tile flooring with 1970s grout.
They make room for the washer/dryer set from Big Sandy
while lamenting the lack of cupboard space,
a sense of foreboding for the hundreds of meals
reluctantly cooked out of duty to marriage and motherhood,
the years of never quite getting it right. The Kitchen,
of course, is a metaphor for all her daughter's failures,
the salad spinner melted on the hot stovetop,
the scorched wooden spoons, warped containers
that should have never gone in the microwave.
All that burnt meat. When her mother visits,
she doesn’t speak of the obvious. She describes
the brightly lit houses she passed on the train,
meeting teachers and poets across the communal table
of the dining car. She cleans the kitchen before showering,
before unpacking, but not before making her own cup of tea.
As she scrubs the rings of crusted plastic off the stovetop,
she knows she cannot fix her daughter’s unhappiness,
but she can, for a moment, make that stainless steel shine.

 

Hayley Mitchell Haugen is Professor of English at Ohio University Southern in rural Southeast Ohio. She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.