Rasma Haidri’s poems and essays appear in Action Spectacle, Under the Radar, Prairie Schooner, Sycamore Review, and Fourth Genre, among other journals and anthologies in the US, UK, Norway, India, Hong Kong, and UAE. She is the author of a poetry collection, As If Anything Can Happen, and three textbooks. Recognitions for her writing include the Southern Women Writers creative non-fiction award, the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters & Science poetry award, Western Michigan University’s Third Coast Conference prize for fiction, NewVerseNews’ Best of the Net nomination, Riddled with Arrow’s Ars Poetica prize, and EasyStreet magazine’s Great American Sentence award. Rasma reads for the Baltic Residency and PRISM and holds an M.Sc. in reading education from the University of Wisconsin and an MFA in poetry and memoir from the University of British Columbia. A first-generation South Asian and second-generation Norwegian-American, Rasma grew up in Detroit, Miami, Manhattan, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and later lived in Wisconsin, France, Hawaii, and Norway, where she now makes her home on a seacoast island. Visit her at www.rasma.org.
Practice
Over there the window
shows morning—gray sky
proves the earth has been turning.
Here nothing moves. A cat.
A child asleep. A pot of tea.
The closed cover of my writing journal.
I do the tai chi form Preparation… Beginning…
all the way to Single Whip.
It’s all I know.
Assume the Spirit of the Crane, the instructor said,
but the shadow I cast was broken. When is a crane - ?
When is unbalance flying?
I asked a man what he does for a living and
he said, I used to be a poet. Why used?
Because I am no longer writing.
I am a poet not writing. Days of not
writing turn into weeks, months,
until the taste of poet
is a wet pill on my tongue, writer
a remarkable piece of clothing I wouldn’t
even know where to buy.
My child hits her head and sick
soaks my non-writing hands that hold her to my body.
Her breath is small cranes flying.
When is a poet - ?
I slice onions, comb the cat, teach a child
to erase words without ripping.
My hands cup water to my baby’s head.
In the window - gray sky. Tomorrow
I will start again from nothing.
by Rasma Haidri
winner of Riddled With Arrows Ars Poetica Award 2018
Valentine’s Eve
I see you in the crowd
turned out in this arctic town
to mark the U.S. assault
on Iraq, shouts like gunshot—PEACE! NOW!
Bush lynched in effigy, his—my—flag
on fire—my country—
no longer mine, I have none, no one
not even you
speak my language, my mother tongue mute
after the city I loved fell,
twice-buried beneath towers of dust.
You slip from khaki pockets a pencil stub,
small red notebook. Who are you
to be writing when I didn't even think
to bring a journal?
The throng roils, I am a snagged branch
in a surging flood, then
my husband, carrying one daughter,
whispers, I looked for you,
then saw your tiger-striped hair.
On the brink of invasion,
I have no idea
how the world will change.