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Keith Polette

On the Line

The white shirts pinned to the clothesline are the ghosts of decapitated businessmen. Socks are quarter notes in B-flat minor dangling from the bottom of the scale. Pants are rabbit ears, stiff and upside down, listening intently for the coyote’s soft footfalls. Sheets, weary of a world gone flat, flap in the breeze, delighting, for a moment, in being birds’ blank wings. Pinned underwear makes a mixed family, each a mask in a story not told, but hinted at. The monochromatic towels are featureless, cleansed, waiting to soak up another week of gossip. After the laundry is taken down, birds land on the line to sun themselves and to sing of news we will never know.

wind gust
the sudden uplift
of my voice

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About the Author

Keith Polette’s haibun appear in The Haibun Journal, Frogpond, Presence, The Akitsu Quarterly, Sonic Boom, Haibun Today, and contemporary haibun online. He lives in El Paso, Texas.