Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
Title Page, poems by Stephen Haven.
Title Page
On the edge it matters, your song being glad or bitter,
Only you are singing. It matters, the song,
Apart from the singer, apart from the mic,
The megaphone, the portable podium,
Only that it’s strummed. Peripherally, it matters.
Apart from singing, what can you do who live
Slim on the edge of things? You must sip,
You must tip the frame of that silence.
When an entire continent hangs its purchase
In the bandwidth, the broken bark of you,
You must sing, being glad or bitter,
To no one, to someone, you on the edge.
Butterscotch
He’d pitch his billy bats where they were sure to lock
The mower’s ride and rip, the engine choked
And farted when they hit. He’d clock you in the shins,
Limb you across the grass, no wider berth
For your unsuspecting kids, each elementary emergency
Pausing just a few webbed feet away. He’d peel the paper
From the walls, gnaw the door jams down.
He’d tuck the cat’s head entirely in his mouth,
Scaring her to the point of his jaded pleasure.
Her talon tip flipped his switch. Then suddenly he’d go
Super Mario, two black coals in a sixty-five-pound pack
Of snow, baby bear snout, stubby legs, a private
Pamplona bursting the gate of your beige carpet, where in
The living with the picture window your daughter turned
Her cartwheels. The kids laughed at his mad mud!
No shock could wake him to his better senses.
In the sound a leaf blower might make in a wish
For silence or grace, you remember his run beneath
Lollipops in baskets that poked Ohio’s sky,
Wild Fire, Wings Over Wicker, blimping each July.
One came down behind the house, the pilot ditching
Her day’s levity in the wireless street. A fire-breathing
Goddess angled a chariot twenty feet above
Your ten-foot basket. From that distance she strafed,
Around your colonial, a jolted splotch of ivory,
Scotcho scooting for his life, one barbaric yawp
Lapping the house. Then one day you sent your son,
Too young to collar him, to hitch him to the run.
Scotch caught his end in the grill of your daughter’s
Flute teacher’s van. Or else you remember
The red rabbits, your Butter on the stoop
Of a summer you cut tight circles with the tractor
Around a rotten stump. Clumped in the grass
Without their backs they looked like baby mice,
Like a heart with its house of ribs peeled back.
The part you shared to the shock of a summer class
Was how you bludgeoned them with a cherry kindling,
Buried them in the far back garden, where the kids
Would never see, the students angered because
You offered it was mainly your own trouble
That sickened you, with all you had to do.
Scotch had them swinging from his mouth the next morning.
Your calico leapt five feet in air the first night
He wasn’t there, and stuck like Velcro to the sideways circles
She ran on your porch screens. That night you were
The second thing that scared her, your seven-year-old
Whistling a lovely oblivion in the kitchen. Then the stars,
The moons of your daughter’s phosphorescent room.
Halfway between the comforters, your son already sleeping,
From the floor you read “Maggie Scraggle Loves
The Beautiful Ice Cream Man,” The Oxford Treasury
A tent over your head. In a first-night sort of vespers,
Until the moon stole all trouble from your doors,
The girl who chatted with the moles, dauntless,
Fearless in catacombs, when you asked her
From her red covers, rose with the swallows, with all other
Creatures that spoke to her, and for the dog years
He had given you, lifted one last prayer to the late-night air.
The Peaceable Kingdom
Everywhere around you the Hawkins Supermarket cashier
Exchanges the good news about her Great Aunt Bertha
With the manicured fifth-grade instructor who cites
Kids, cousins, purple and gold pom poms, the fundraiser
She wants to funnel mainly through the Moms and Dads,
The kids leading the passing traffic through the suds.
In her charitable vision, windshields they’re paid to scrub,
Girls tap dance with signs along the small-town strip,
5 bucks a pop and you can bet everyone will tip. All this
In a New York minute gone suddenly slow-mo
In Ashland, Ohio. All you needed was a little milk for home.
The cashier doesn’t seem to see as you swing the pendulum
Of your chivalry in a gallon, ready to belt them in their Bibles,
The peaceable kingdom they thought the Earth had gone to
Right here in the heartland, where once their parents
Went to school. Your haste pegs you a snob-nosed radical
Straight from the East. No matter you teach Sundays too,
Keep the covenant your neighbors agreed to, your lawn in
Its crew cut, 3/8’s of an inch or even your Hold ‘Em friends
Start to talk. When the teacher asks her niece for a price check
She as good as rips the vinyl from your old colonial.
Somewhere the lion paces with the lamb, the wolf, the yearling
Dozing together. Ever more genuinely a child leads them,
William Penn soothsaying Delaware Indians. Your kids etch
Their initials in one corner of the family portrait the summer
You fed them straight off the barbecue. Hicks offered something
Like 100 variations, all those Kingdoms peacefully wired
In his one great gallery. Over a familial cup of Twining’s
Each morning he waited for inspiration, scanned everything
He once made, the same old business of beasts and burdens
Lovingly lifted, even among humans, the inner quietude
For which there is no final herd or hurdle. And when
He was done, he started painting 101.
© Stephen Haven
Stephen Haven’s fourth collection of poems, The Flight from Meaning, was published in 2025 by Slant Books. His three earlier collections are: The Last Sacred Place in North America; Dust and Bread; and The Long Silence of the Mohawk Carpet Smokestacks. For more details, see stephenhaven.com.