10.5 / September & October 2015

Four Poems

05/07

We build a gaggle of grandparents
out of a sunset & a rabbit warren.

Inside that gaggle, place the matriarch
with a griffin’s head.

Constellations pour

from her mouth.
We call her the Juggernaut.

We foster a tour of the future

as we would
foster a pair of baby swallows. Think of how

a bicycle looks, right before popping a wheelie.

Add dawn to this. In a few years,

add a star. White. Paint it blue the next year.
Green after that. Make it a slow prism.





07/24

Mouse down into that gully wode —
under conifers shouldering conifers:
          she’s boiling ginseng in a hubcap
          Firs Phen Eugepai Silviorum &
if you look down the trail bright as blood, see:

1. Smoke wallpapering the elm’s pallet violet.
2. Binary sunlight in slanted beakers of copse.
3. Her roof made from the hood of a V6 Viper and floorboards,
4. Her hut a stand of blossoming hemlocks.

Fifteen miles east is the Steamboat Landing…but

Firs Phen’s got something she’s stirring and she stirs it with a
garden gnome and even though it looks like she’s boiling the
gnome whole…

she turns, says It is day 19. Hands you
          an upside-down helmet full of acorn brew. Later,
          when you finally see the daguerreotype
of all of this happening — yes,
those are lucent lines, etched from your crown to sky.





Books I am Reading

Books I am reading include THE BABY PRESIDENT, an inside look
at the adorable country that elected an infant to office;

TINSELLITIS, the story of an ear-nose-and-throat doctor who
accidentally invented a new type of holiday decoration;

HEAVEN SENT HELEN, a tale of a grandmother and
granddaughter who bond while trying to enforce the speed limit
on their residential street;

CHARLOTTE BRONTE? BY JANE EYRE, an adaptation of the classic
novel in which the character Jane Eyre writes a book called
CHARLOTTE BRONTE?; and

NEXT!, a bank-teller’s guide to avoiding the kind of silence &
stillness needed to take a long, hard look at your life.





02/21

The moment your spine is created you get the gateway, the get-away route; long green aisles of palm trees down which a word-glyph floats. Another glyph floats close enough for you to touch: argent tincture. You think this is the phrase for when a new surfboard is made. A link of sky you click on it. The sky opens up a kind of sky what makes you remember the word planetary. You want to say the word for sky but you say a different word.

Silver dragees, you say.


Lauren Haldeman is the author of the poetry collection Calenday (Rescue Press, 2014) which was a finalist for the 2014 Julie Suk Award. Her work has appeared in Fence, jubilat, Tupelo Quarterly and The Rumpus. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she was a recent recipient of the 2015 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award. You can find her on twitter @laurenhaldeman, or online at http://laurenhaldeman.com
10.5 / September & October 2015

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