Sketchbook  Helen Ruggieri, US

 

Three All Saint's Day Haiku* November first  candy wrappers litter  the sidewalks  November first  only small pumpkins  still in the field  in the gutter smashed pumpkins  for the birds  *Temps Liebres Serge Tome

 

Haibun Buying My Blue Dress The day I bought my blue dress was like a conspiracy of cotton. I  imagined a Guatemalan woman looming it with her dark fingers, her face flat, so closed not even a  daughter could read it. I could see her needle threaded with the bright embroidery of tradition, hear the relentless click of the shuttle.  She cast a spell, a shadow, as if poverty were sewn into the dress,  the orange flowers embroidered on it about to explode, the blue under the half-moons of her nails bleeding into the dye of the fabric.  While I was browsing, a young girl in an orange shirt ran from the  store with what she took and a clerk ran off after her, bringing her back,  crying, promising never to do it again, promising to work it off,  begging the owner not to call the cops, not to call her mother.  All the shoppers stopped, looking harder for something to buy until the  owner decided, until she called the police or she let the girl go. We  waited, the audience  posing as shoppers. I stood in the three-way mirror watching me in the dress,  the shoplifter who loved beautiful things, and behind us the dark woman who makes them, deciding in the mirror, as each of us had, what we would make or buy or take.  Whenever I wear that blue dress, it wavers, the way a flame does in a  breeze, and the orange breaks through.  old window glass— my reflection wavers blurs

 

Haibun Do You Know This Woman? The sketch of what she might have looked like when she was alive stared from the front page of the paper—dead since June they think, about the time the carnival was here. Anonymous. Found face down in the wild grass that grows when the water level falls along the river.  The drawing is familiar, as if I knew her, sometime back, in school maybe, but  she was dumb and sat in back, but once in phys ed. we shared a locker and I saw her ragged underwear.  She drops out, you don’t even wonder where she went. Maybe he let her ride for free, her long fine hair shiny under the tilt-a-whirl lights. Maybe he sat by her, gravity throwing her against him.  A hunter looking for his dog stumbled over the rib cage; the scraps of cloth wrapping the bones. They think she wore jeans, a cotton shirt.  She was with us such a short time, late teens, they think. She was so loosely connected no one missed her.  Perhaps when he wrapped his finger around the ends of her hair she walked into the dark with him. Perhaps she wanted to. Perhaps he hurt her. Perhaps she said she’d tell.  I hope she opened under him, licked the salt on his neck, knew that brief touching everywhere before he rolled her over, pumped two shots behind her ear.  in the dead end  of November, withered grasses

 

Haiku I polish up old poems— snow falls and falls  the sea  carved a poem  in the sand  suddenly  the fragrance of  your body  the lost dog  looks up, hopefully— below zero  stars fill up  the summer sky—  swans on the lake

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