PROSE POEM

DOROTHY WALL
​

HAIKU


It’s when you have 5 syllables, 7 syllables, 5, and it’s about nature or a season, and disjuncture because that’s how life is, whatever you see there’s always a juxtaposition, like

          a skinny-haunched dog
                    pissing in slick snow, a hiss
          of steamy beauty

that’s one, and so this scraggly, flea-bitten, urine-smelling world has these moments when you laugh and that steamy piss-drilled snow hole is beautiful, it’s what life is, it’s everything there is. Crazy. It has green peaches and cuckoos and moonlight and things like that, so you might say

          evening light on the
                    old cuckolded cuckoo, its
          rain-drenched cries fade

now that’s a sad one, not so funny, but it’s another world we can carry around and wonder about and that’s the thing, kids get this really fast, since they wonder about everything, they want to taste that green peach, and why is it bitter and can you use cats, and were there cats in Japan and suddenly you’re all opening that folded envelope sent in spite of despair, biting into a ripe pear.

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​Dorothy Wall is author of Identity Theory: Poems (Blue Light Press) and the essay collection Encounters with the Invisible: Unseen Illness, Controversy, and Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (Southern Methodist University Press), and coauthor of Finding Your Writer's Voice: A Guide to Creative Fiction (St. Martin's Press). Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and her poems and essays have been published in magazines and anthologies, including Witness, Prairie Schooner, Bellevue Literary Review, Nimrod, Cimarron Review, Sonora Review and others. She has taught poetry and fiction writing at San Francisco State University and U.C. Berkeley Extension. www.dorothywall.com