Returning from California: Haibun

Rachel Morgan

    B sent me home with avocados from a tree in her yard. I learned there is a butterfly called a blue morphos, that my oldest has known this. For years. My children visited the fault-land of their birth. Everywhere, there are protests in the streets. The richest are in office, and The Great Gatsby is 100 years old. Shoes take the shape of a gait, a belt’s notch my limit. The myth that otters keep a well-chosen rock in a pocket, for years. For life. Like a question, the chosen rock is the most convenient. All circles have a midpoint, also cities, but circles are equal in the same way questions are not. I’d been asking if I could trust him. Not if he was trustworthy. Blades of a jonquil have greened at my front steps, the avocados ripen on the counter. Name one thing that heals in a week. Or a day.

 

       Brown house wren returns

       effervescent song and twigs

       new mother, old nest.

about the author
Rachel Morgan

Rachel Morgan

Rachel Morgan is the author of the chapbook, Honey & Blood, Blood & Honey (Final Thursday Press), and her work recently appears in Best New Poets 2024, Prairie Schooner, Alaska Quarterly Review, Journal of the American Medical Association, Beloit Poetry Journal, and Shenandoah. She is the winner of the 2020 Fineline contest, and her work has been supported by the Sustainable Arts Foundation. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Currently she teaches at the University of Northern Iowa, is an Editor for the North American Review, and a 2024-2025 Iowa Artist Fellow.