Harriot West

The Boy with Pale Green Skin

Once I loved a boy with pale green skin. I sat across the table from him in a
linguistics seminar where I tried to keep my mind on Chomsky's colorless green
ideas but I kept staring at the boy. Bewitched by his phosphorescent glow, I
found myself adrift in an underwater grotto, swimming with schools of blue and
yellow fish through fields of undulating kelp to the deep-sea palace of my Mer-Prince.

I ran into him this morning when I was buying sushi. He's a wine salesman.
Married with two children and a dark blue Volvo. It turns out he was allergic
to wheat. He stopped eating crackers and his skin lost all its luminescence.

Some Things I Know

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs his wife and I eat fish tacos and
wonder if there will be enough leftovers for dinner.

Upstairs a man is dying while across town passengers mill about the Amtrak
station in ninety-degree heat, waiting for the northbound train, the one that is always late.

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs his sister kneels on the living room
floor and pins together pieces of a patchwork quilt.

Upstairs a man is dying while on television a woman in a pink dress decides
to buy a vowel.

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs my friend is struggling to remember
her husband as he was. Not this man who pushes her away when she tries to
help him roll over in bed or turns his face to the wall and refuses to speak to her.

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs I blame the man for my friend’s
grief and wonder why he can’t die with a bit of grace.

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs his grandson stares at the bronze
statue of a naked woman. Surreptitiously he rubs his finger across her
nipples and traces a line to her navel.

Upstairs a man is dying while two thousand miles away a son is angry with a
father who never lent him money to buy a house.

Upstairs a man is dying while next door a neighbor wonders if a slab of
frozen meatloaf is an okay way to say, “I love you. I care.”

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs his wife worries about the smell of
death that permeates the house. She walks from room to room with an atomizer
until the smell of cedar mingles with the smell of shit and dirty linens.

Upstairs a man is dying while across the street a woman is harvesting
lavender. The air is filled with the sound of her shears and the smell of
bruised stalks ready to be bundled and hung in the attic.

Upstairs a man is dying while downstairs sunshine passes through Venetian
blinds, illuminating dust motes in a shaft of light.

Harriot West lives in the Pacific Northwest. Her poetry has appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Ekphrasis, flashquake, Modern Haiku, and New Resonance 5: Emerging Voices in English Language Haiku. contact

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