Inaugural Haiku
By Carla Drysdale
Damp Geneva seeps
into our cold feet marching
to protect women.
Stone sky tablet for
black calligraphy of trees
writing history.
The new president
says he’ll get rid of columns
when building new rooms.
The new president
says he’ll protect you from them
and then the rain falls.
The president’s mouth
puckers when he peers at us:
“I love you all now.”
Originally published in What Rough Beast, Indolent Books, 2017.
Carla Drysdale is the author of Little Venus (Tightrope Books, 2009) and Inheritance (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Her poems have appeared in LIT, The Tower Journal, Cleaver Magazine, PRISM International, The Same, Literary Review of Canada and The Fiddlehead, among other journals. She has work forthcoming in Nasty Women Poets: An Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse, to be published by Lost Horse Press. In 2014, she won PRISM’s annual Earle Birney poetry prize and was nominated in 2015 for Bettering American Poetry. Born in Ontario, she lives with her husband and two sons in Ornex, France. Visit her website at www.carladrysdale.com.
Photo credit: Mahmood Salam via a Creative Commons license.