Bad Colony Haiku

No corkscrew; no bar.
I can hear this guy snoring
like Raven; thin towels.

Fox stole both my shoes;
pinecones bonk me on the head.
Fireplace broken.

Can’t think of image.
Soggy path to muse.
Ran out of paper.

They don’t give us food.
User fees: WTF?
Forgot pen.

No place to hang out.
Expect you to work.
No one here is very cute.

Left Right Left Right

With a garden to my left—sad-sack bed of slug-laced kale,
combat-fatigued arugula, mangy mustard. With the ashen

past to my right.The first is a feast, pumpkin pot roast,
vittles robbed from a patch you thought your own.

With a garden to my left, lifted from gardens unknown,
Little Boy Blue, blowing a ghostly, gourd-ish horn.

Shed his first tear while I slept-walked, squeezed his name
from a tube, eluded the blood-draw man, begged for Ativan,

for my daily bath, signed for my razor at the in-take desk.
Shutter’s click (forever missed). Smoldered in a can she’s burning

alive, bits of char picked up from my brother’s it’s not all powdery;
there’s chunks. Came back not in an urn but ready to offer

my skin, my stroll in a meadow where sparrows trill like whistling bones.  

Martha Silano’s books include The Little Office of the Immaculate Conception, winner of the 2010 Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize, and Reckless Lovely (Saturnalia Books 2014). She also co-edited, with Kelli Russell Agodon, The Daily Poet: Day-By-Day Prompts For Your Writing Practice (Two Sylvias Press 2013). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, Blackbird, AGNI, New Ohio Review, and Orion, among others. Martha edits Crab Creek Review and teaches at Bellevue College.