Rasma Haidri

Currents
 
When you hand me a handle-less teacup
with blue porcelain flowers, 
 
I think of my mother,
saying science believed
in no such thing as a blue flower,
 
so if I found one, I’d be famous.
I looked for years, certain
I’d seen one, wondering
if science had heard of bluebells.
                       
In the end, I thought blue 
must be like apples--
who could say if apple in my mouth,
tasted apple to others? 
 
You dip a wrought-iron spoon 
into the cup--
Red currants…want some? 
 
I expect sweet,
but get Wisconsin summer breeze
through my Norwegian grandma’s clapboard house,
white-petal-clouds in a robin-egg-sky,
a hedge higher than my head,
 
where fat currants sit red-jeweling
among leprechaun leaves,
my tongue pressing the berries—           
juice zapping electric
red, the only flavor
tasting only of itself. 
 
I was a girl then,
couldn’t see over the hedge, 
or dream I’d ever
taste such juice again.

Trust
I kneel in the attic,
next to a box of little girl dresses,
feeling our impending goodbye.
No brain, I am only heart
and skin and breathing,
                        staring at nothing,
not even an imagined
Kristiansand,
            till I see
in the flashlight beam,
a world of dust, swirling chaos,
specks like planets 
flung from orbit,
massing, revolving back,
splitting into twos and threes
and lonely ones--
                        and I know
I orchestrated
this music of spheres--
 
as I watch,
everything changes:
dust specks settle
            into one flow--
from solos to chorus,
and this too, I know
I conduct.
 
 
 
 

Rasma Haidri grew up in Tennessee and makes her home on the arctic seacoast of Norway. She is the author of As If Anything Can Happen (Kelsay, 2017) and three college textbooks. Her writing has appeared in literary journals including Nimrod, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, and Fourth Genre and has been widely anthologized in North America, Asia, Europe and the Middle East. She is a current MFA candidate at the University of British Columbia and serves as a reader for the Baltic Residency program. Awards for her work include a Vermont Studio residency, the Southern Women Writers Association emerging writer award in creative non-fiction, the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award, and a Best of the Net nomination. Visit her at www.rasma.org.