Margaret Hasse
mmhasse@gmail.com

How We Missed the Moon


The fields and hills were strange and we were tired.
People waited in their lawn chairs, peering
at the eastern sky. We didn’t stay awake
for the blood moon to darken, for earth’s shadow
to press a gray scrim edged with lunar light.
We saw it second-hand,
in pictures and stories. It’s the way
in life: sometimes we must miss the event
on purpose. Our friend couldn’t watch
the woman he loved cut open, gloved hands
gone into her to pull out the small purple fish
of their flesh who never cried or moved.
The full moon glares bright like an operating room.
We need a dim place, sometimes we turn away.





Beginning May with a Line from Tim Nolan


So much I have forgotten:
breeze,
its trembling

the melodic smell
of apple blossoms
with ink dark centers

a morning spider
with her wise
octagonal web

toes of tennis shoes
spangled 
by dew

wet sheets galloping
on the line and ants
on the march

bells of tulip blossoms,
birds with bedding
in their beaks.

Now we’ve seen
three white butterflies
we can go barefoot.

Come, lie by me on the grass
in the long afternoons.
O, love, your gray hair.





Our Next Home

​
I keep dreaming of houses. Last night
I walked through a bungalow with a realtor
who read aloud from a book of poems
called Real Estate. The white paint
on all the walls was ready to accept anything.
A pony grazed in the living room
on a green shag carpet. Eat it all,
I said, I don’t like the color. Empty bookcases
shone sleek and teak. Two front doors
side-by-side made of soft material
throbbed like the chambers of a heart.
When I tell my husband about the dream,
he asks if the house is smaller
than where we live now in Saint Paul.
Is it located in a warmer climate? He wants
me to dream of down-sizing. He wants
me to have a Florida dream.

-All three poems first published in BoomerLitMag.com