Three required haiku

3/30/16

Goodbye to everything
Eighteen in the suburbs all summer
Light pollution

Dear distant body
You wake fast in terror
At all your edges something shivers

Crocus air / open window
He splits the yolk and curses
Laughing yellow in his arms

PSY101

3/14/16

Science—

beyond pheromones, hormones, aesthetics of bone,
every time I make love for love’s sake alone,

I betray you. 

—Katherine Larson, "Love at Thirty-two Degrees"

1.
Today I read about the amygdala,
the first daffodil
slumped under hail in the yard,
the wet leather of my shoes
skirting sidewalk pools in the dark.

I for introvert, N for intuitive,
T T crucial T . . .

Are you good at math?

In the nearest parallels, yes—
math consumes me—
but here:

I come home with random variable x.
I come home with leftover pho, or rainwater.
I come home with two watermelon radishes
cupped like baseballs,
gifts from someone I don't yet know
how to name in poetry.

I tell him—this pronoun—
the word brassica.

Even radishes? he says,
visible process whirring,

and kisses me; I forget nothing.


2. 

In the quiet room I'm asked about skin.
Blush, sunburn.
Dermatographia.

The first crocus air through the screen:
what it wakes in skin.
Men salivating behind dark glasses:
what they leave on skin.

Are you good at math?

I was raised without it.
Touch— unbidden,
uncounted:
what it does to skin.

Are you good
at science?

     The condition is raised red.
     The condition is you're young
     and your body looks juicier than you know.
     The condition is terror.

Listen,
I can't trust science.

Any science— I was taught
to fear them all.