Maureen Armstrong

Raccoon Poet Washing Her Words

[haikkun]

Ouisconsin

Means, “It lies. Re(a)d.”

My tears erode me, as eras condense

Suffering to indifference

I wish it could be earthquakes

Done in seconds

Red river carves my face from rock

Hiccups into my neck

Dissolves my essence

In this way water is stronger than fire

And I’m not going to make it

I couldn’t even ascend the stairs without collapsing

You hum upon my every exhale

I starve

In your absence

__________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Alice in Wonderbread

On top of this coat

Of instinct

Bicycles a head

Needle assaults anatomy

Points out anomalies on the grid

The etymology groans

A peregrine resides behind

Whatever shallow wake

You left of it

And Alice got a piece of bread

But what did I get?

______________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

I Don’t Know

And that’s the biggest truth

I don’t know how to exist in this world

Without you

Even as

I’m doing it as we speak

I watch the video of us kissing

And burst in tears afterwards, that I rarely let

See the surface

Because then I would have to answer them

Why not go?

Why not just go?

Be by him

You know…

It gets tricky

Is that me choosing pain and mundane

Over startling alacrity?

I have this knowledge now

That changes everything

Of what sublimity

Life is capable of…

How do I close my eyes at night?

How do I wake?

When I could just dream it forever

I don’t know

What do I do with all this longing turning me inside out?

I don’t know

Who takes me to jail if I fail to check for initiative?

I don’t know

WYUT?

I don’t know

Cool

Me, too

_____________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Sliver

You can see the deck your dad built, nesting,

From space

I walked past the classroom where you built birdhouses

And I bet they’re still wherever they’re perched, too

Love like that

Doesn’t leave this earth soon

It takes a lot of emotional erosion

More than weathering of plank board, acid rain,

Or even fire’s renovation

I kick myself

I should’ve jumped from the car

And pleaded the woman

We could’ve walked down the steps that he made

We could have earned

A splinter

Sure, something to fester

But even that gets pined for sometimes

In the missing of another

Some souvenir to prove he keeps

Needling into your life

Sliver decks share hive mind abilities

I project these things

I don’t understand fully

I only want traces in me, too

____________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

One Ordinary Tuesday At A Time

Gravity insists everything eventually falls

Longing quietly replies,

“Yes.

Toward.”

Forever keeps trying to interrupt Tuesday,

But Tuesday insists

On finishing the dishes first

Plenty of people losing sight

Of the forest for the trees

Enough to cliché the meaning

Meanwhile, I’m busy up to my eyeballs

In the jungle, missing the leaves

I know how to imagine Forever

But I can’t draw a picture

Of the way people talk

Through memes

He hasn’t even decided that he wants to be with you in this life…

Meanwhile, I’m already picking out

Our seventeenth-anniversary vows in the afterlife

Or so ChatGTP cheekily betrays me

Funny thing is

Tuesday outlives eternity

And maybe someday I learn

Not to shout before I speak

________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Fata Morgana

Forgot what you came to the creek for

Didn’t you, girlie?

Sitting and divorcing the need to be perceived?

For once in your life

Stopped looking over your shoulder

Or looking poised for god knows whom

(Some imaginary reality TV show’s

Omnipresent zoom?)

And when you realized

You were willing to be here

A.L.O.N.E.

It took a while for it to morph less like

Choice

And more like

Natural consequence

Just the reality

Nobody coming looking for you

In the way you really need it

Head slipping beneath the surface

And that’s when you finally saw clearly

Creek crystalline

No floaters-in-eyes

Even with waterline bisecting cheek from cheek

Prismatic scatter everywhere the water riffled through

A passage of rock or time or hue

Soul cracked wide

Psilocybe view

-

I watched the minnows take nips

From toes that wouldn’t go blue-

My heat could not be diffused

And I finally heard a god in my mouth ask

“Who do you need to become to die?”

A view I’d never perused

Apparently, according to 老师,

You can carry only one identity through

Across the void

So choose, and choose wise

Because it may impact your being called back

Sounds serious

But I just felt

Thrilled about the dying

And as I sat there

Creating steam

BURNING

And feeling this nature of my insatiable being

Trying finally

To let go of .things.

And I know you don’t like this next part

So I’m going to skip it

But for a little bit

I’ve known a little hope

That the city on the horizon feels real

That something could quench the untouchable in me

And that has meant a great deal

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

You’re My Miracle

I dug our initials in

Before we noticed the triangles around them

The earth is building something sweet for us

Can you feel it?

The cracks for pressure to get through

The paint of the steam

The cleansing reckoning

Are we going to put our feet in it

And finally come clean?

The only word I know is holy

And I hate that

But this is what I was really praying for all those years

This is the only miracle

And I am humbled to perceive it

________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

You’re My Favorite Shape

I just got back from cloud nine and have returned to the “plain” of mortal existence.

Everything tastes like ash.

Where we came from

Love used to make itself in our mouths

And every laugh was bursting with vitamins and calories.

I just ate a cheeseburger

And I tasted

Nothing.

How do I come up from that?

Before, you were always just a room away

The search still felt forever and was silly because it always ended in victory.

Now you’re in a place I cannot echolocate by puckering my lips and summoning with kisses.

We are both lost and torn here

But the sameness is not the same as having our breath braided in the windpipes and simmering on the air conditioners that couldn’t keep up with us.

I cannot reach out and feel this sameness without hating myself for being part source of its pain umbilicus.

Everything before is foreign.

I can’t read words anymore, they are meaningless compared to your breath.

________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Qui, Elle?

I look like a completely different person

When you take pictures of me

But I recognize her…

The inner child who still believes

You make me smile too big for photographs

Like something is trying to escape my face

My lip always looks like it’s going to tremble

And I tuck my chin down,

To get my eyes

Closer to what they desire

I don’t think I’ve ever seen myself look

Both “in love” and “safe” before

Perhaps that’s where the hiccup in cognition hails from

My face scrunches

In a way my ancestors’ did on their happiest days

And I would not call me anything required of a model

Not pretty

Not sexy

No “je ne sais quoi”

But whatever it is, instead,

Is far too intimate for mass production silver-platter

The unconscious and unbridled meeting

Of self

With truth

_____________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

I’m not always such an emo little velociraptor baby...

[haikkun]

Liar

[haikkun]

Slipped And Fell In The Soup

I want to take you to the Triangular Irregular Network

To live inside a GIS world of perfection

Every side capable of two coins

Where

The longest length of one delta can also be

The shortest of another

Equivalence, without identity crisis

Counterweight - love made to justice

Topography calculates as easily as viewshed

Through ripples that look

Like gasoline-spread rainbows spillt atop the ground, though those roll flat

I’m going to lay you on this dreamed-of land

Upon one face after another

Every x-axis, every y-bend, every z-bed

And hold you down for pictures

So we can say that we did everywhere

Been everything

__________________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

[haikkun]

Been minutes. How’s everyone doing in our beautiful hellscape?

[haikkun]

Maybe you’re mythical

All I know is

I’ve never adored

Anyone

So much as to call them

“Darling”

Before

__________________

@haikkun

[haikkun]

Muled Whine

I think that stubborn might be

My favorite word in all the world

Stubborn thumbs

Stubborn chin

Stubborn love

Your name lives under my breath

Crowding the tip

Of my stubborn tongue

And it’s always exhales, exhales, exhales

These days

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Secret

This quiet

Is superficial

I write poems which

Cannot see the light of day

Because I’ve already burned

The earth enough times not to

Be wise, and besides, you would

Pretend you didn’t know that they

Were about you anyways, or worse

You’d know it, and let the pamphlets

Fall like little junk mail, to the floor

Whistle a change-the-topic tune

Or rub my face into the snow

In a please-don’t-make-me

Break-your-heart sort of

Way. I’d retire to rooms

To lick my wounds. I’d

Pretend it didn’t kill

Me. Walk around

On eggshells

Staunch the

Bleeding

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun

[haikkun]

Glaucus

I sit down, dangling my feet

Into the water

Pass him a beer, but not before I

Pour a sip for the gods.

“How’d you end up here,

Telling fortunes by the dock?”

“Well... once long ago, While hunting on Mount Oreia, I rubbed my rabbit on a pile of hops. I don’t know if ‘twas the irony- which should have killed him- had the effect of bringing him back from the dead, but I immediately became a pescatarian and swallowed a handful of humulus myself instead”

“Go figure? And the rabbit?”

“He hopped away. Drove me mad! Hopping mad, or maybe that was the hops... but either way my madness drove me into the sea, and it wasn’t Zeus’s orders, if that’s what you heard.”

“I’ve never heard him claim such.”

“Well good! So you see, I ran to the sea, and that’s where I found I can’t be drowned.”

“Oh, I see...”

“In short the hops forever preserved me. I’ll age... never die, just like a proper sea-bound IPA.”

He sifts his hand through the blue-green locks on his scalp

“Ok, but how’d you become a prophet?”

“Like any bro extolling wisdom at a frat party!” He guffawed, “I drink the beer and it speaks for me.”

“Do go on...”

“So I pledged for the neireods (because how does one turn down 50 nymphs?) and after all the hazing, they taught me clarity. How to see the future, as the gods did intend it.

Eventually I became Apollo’s wingman, and it’s amazing how many maidens will sleep with you because you tell them you see it in their future.”

____________________________

Maureen Armstrong @haikkun