Douglas Haynes’ poems and translations of German and Irish poetry have appeared in many publications in the U.S., Europe, and Canada, including Bellevue Literary Review, Poetry Ireland Review, River City, Colere, and Stand. In addition to working as a poet, essayist, and translator, he is an assistant professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh.

Two Poems

The Door

The lock clicks and echoes in the empty courtyard. In the street, two boys

from thirty miles away ask to shine my shoes. They smell like the black polish

all over their arms. A woman sells raw chicken from a wheelbarrow. Her knife glints red in the sun. In front of other doors, wild dogs sleep on each other.

When someone goes out, the dogs scatter then sleep again, ignoring a man shouting camarones with a basket on his head. He rattled my door once.

I opened its plastic window, and he uncovered his basket of prawns.

Through iron bars I saw a pile of limp, overlapping bodies. One fanned its tail

back and forth like a flag still flying above a legion of soldiers on the ground.

Sunday, San Martín Chile Verde

A preacher’s voice praised Jesus through the crackling megaphone

on the tin roof of the one-room church. A toddler played in the pale dirt

behind the building.  It would have been easy to say to my friend

that suffering leads to faith, but just then two barefoot girls

in the road said hello and asked where we came from. They said

their father is a cook in Washington and won’t be back for five years.

They took our hands through their village. I wanted to take them

to their father. After saying goodbye, the girls ran into the church,

and we returned to the land of their father, where we could forget them.