IN RESPONSE TO TREES
BY LISA HITON
In winter I knew them all
as one dead thing,
but now I love to watch them blossom.
The shortest tree
seems Japanese, translates
beauty into sunlike white and pink.
I lie under them
deciphering
their shapes. How to give a name
to something you know so well: Mother,
I know you are afraid
of my love
when I watch the little round discs fall
suicidally toward me. I am afraid
of what I might call them
while they are in the air…
Mother, I want to call them,
my Katarina, my riad, my morning floor,
tiny petals like eyelids
dropping down. The first time I dreamt
of falling
it was peaceful like this:—
nameless world, filled with green light…
by what name, Japanese tree,
by what name, Mother?
VARIATION ON TESTIMONY
BY LISA HITON
I turned before I got in the truck, and in the moment before
desertion I noticed his hair: dunegrass, the blonde arcing, the only thing left
in motion. I get hard. I get gone—
the tires screech and I’m watching the dream in third person: pan out
on dust rising over God’s country. God’s country. Later,
the body will be shittied by birds. The fence without varnish
digging into his spine.
