Flying Island

The Measures, The Years by Anne Haines You step out of shadow for your moment. The singer nods and you go on, roar of the band receding just enough for you to step forth and be heard. You know these six steel strings like you know your name. Better even: you play in dreams, nights far afield when you’ve lost the word for who you are. All the years. All the bars, the smoke and funk, the bad deals when you never got paid. Nights when you rode home flying and nights when you wanted to die— all of them now woven into notes by the scars on your fingers, your capable hands. Could you ever stop loving this? You stroke steel and wood, feel the beat at your back— it’s a story you’ll never stop telling, how you bend notes to your hard will, let them take you where they want you, where the sweat and cacophony need you to be. Every night, all the years line up behind you to speak some of them laughing, some of them grieving the way bad nights do. Every night you ...

It’s Not the Heat, It’s the Mortality by Anne Haines It was the hottest summer anyone could remember. I know Texans laugh at twenty, twenty-one days of ninety but some afternoons the air was so thick with humidity you could have spread it on a birthday cake. Animals died at the county fair, the grand champion hog smothered in his own incipient bacon, lambs panting behind the lemon shake-up stand. Even my sunflowers, bobbing and weaving in the front yard like stunned prizefighters, let their leaves wither, collapse like old women’s hands that have given up on prayer. Seasons like that, everything feels like a warning. And when the nights are no relief, the dark air limp and lowering, we lie as still as possible in separate beds listening to the dense hum of crickets, listening past them to the distant yip of a coyote, past that to the slow machine of weather churning in the distance, in the moonlight’s steam, in the unavoidable swelter of August’s ...

Save As by Anne Haines Small transformation demands a whole new name: to document this new omission, pristine identity. Select location, puzzle out the path. The old one’s shadowed. How we can begin again without destroying, certain of reversion. How we are so in love with every draft that ruffles through the pages. How we save the changes. Bio: Anne Haines’ chapbook, Breach, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2008. Individual poems have appeared in Diode, Field, New Madrid, Rattle, Tipton Poetry Journal, the anthology And Know This Place: Poetry of Indiana , and elsewhere. She lives in Bloomington, where she works as the Web Content Specialist for the Indiana University Libraries. She can be found online at http://annehaines.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @annehaines.