Barbara Ungar

But Stu Thinks It’s Good

How come I can’t get anyone to publish this haiku, I say. I think it’s one of your best, he says. Maybe it’s the word heaven—originally, I had sky there; should I switch back? He says, But then you’d lose the Heavenly Blue reference. But maybe people don’t know that’s what the blue ones are called, I say. Or maybe no one borrows a cup of sugar from their neighbor anymore. Don’t give up, he says. I won’t, I say. It’s already been rejected by Modern Haiku, Frogpond, Acorn, Heron’s Nest, bottle rockets, Akitsu, Kingfisher, and Wales. There are so many other places to try, he says. I know, I say. Maybe when I finally publish a book of haiku, I’ll put it in. Or maybe I’ll write a haibun about how no one wants it. Yeah, do that, he says, and put in everything you just said. What did I just say? I say.

borrowing a cup
of heaven
morning glory

 

 

Genug Iz Genug,

I want to cry, this year I lost you.
And my cat, and my job. I stumble
numb, whisper goodbye to Margo in hospice,
Ann who fell down stairs into coma,
and my brilliant friend with ALS.

Enough, I whimper. But what if this were
Gaza. What if Hiroshima. What if
Auschwitz. There is no enough. We go
peacefully, or screaming NO
like Susan Sontag from her hospital bed.

Still so beautiful, Margo plucks at the sheets
and doesn’t speak. The fisher doesn’t care
if fish struggle in the net. Maybe
some octopus with feeling eyes might get
spared. But only briefly. Death eats us all.

 

Breather

                        (for Hollis)

Every night a different death
—sometimes two or three—
& every night, it’s solved.
No one’s ever brought back to life
but some get saved
by the canny yet flawed inspector
the sexy but troubled young sergeant
the quirky pathologist
on some sublime coastline,
country houses smeared with stage blood.

Never cared for mysteries
but every night now
tired of keeping
stiff and carrying on
the calm upper lip
I collapse to my fainting couch
as you on yours
with afghans & cats & tea
a ritual we share from afar
so when we turn in

we can lie abed thinking, Okay, so he
killed her, but why did she kill the other
guy? untangling the intricacies
netted in Brit, Scot, Geordie, or
Shetland dialect, and in that
unknotting get carried off
to blissful unknowing
because we know we’ll wake back up
to the cancer, the horror,
all the deaths that cannot be solved.

 

Barbara Ungar’s After Naming the Animals addresses the sixth extinction, and is recently out from The Word Works, which also published Immortal Medusa and Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life. Prior books include Save Our Ship, which won the Snyder Prize from Ashland Poetry Press, and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Poetry Prize. Professor emerita from The College of St Rose, she lives in Saratoga Springs, New York.
www.barbaraungar.net <http://www.barbaraungar.net/>