Can I convince you I’ve been to the moon?

Tie together words—

bed sheets become rope

for a hasty back window escape.

I am an Astronaut. It’s true.

The tender craters fill your dreams

and my days like letters in a mailbox.

My words push past your eyes—

running rhinos, quick but clumsy,

like a life without vowels.

*

Lessons from Monks and Shepherds

About my dead father I don’t want to write. I want

to fall into a swamp. Even quicksand will do. Here,

here are my shoes. If only I knew how to use curse

words but they become unraveled in my mouth

whenever I feel willing to exploit their effect. A father

is there even when he’s not there.  Does it matter

what took him away? Cancer. War. Aren’t they all theft?

On earth there is so little space left where we are truly free

to weep. I have not picked up my guitar in a while.

If alive would he steer me toward silence?

I shall take lessons from monks and shepherds

how to not need motion.  The smooth stones

in the creek bed become smooth by force—

the demands of water. I will have to learn

more lullabies. I know only one

and I sing it over and over to my son.

**

Crystal Hadidian was born in Austin, Texas. While an undergraduate at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she won the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. Crystal currently resides in San Diego, where she is both full time graduate student at San Diego State University and a full time mother.

Archived at http://lit.konundrum.com/poetry/hadidianc_poems.php

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