Dan Lukiv

One Hot Day, poetry Dan Lukiv

Revised Edition: LukivPress (Canada), 2021.

Previously published as Her Story, a collection (Poetry of the People, USA, 2003).

An excerpt

The Kitten

A blonde girl
Exhales mist
Into the night.
Her eyelashes are wet;
She wipes her cheeks dry,
But she wears no makeup:
She is too young for that.

She calls again
Into every dark space,
Tree, and bush,
Into every molecule
For her kitten.

A car rattles past;

Her brother should not have
Left the porch door open
Three nights ago!

She bites down hard.
Her mother,
At the kitchen window,
Shrugs her shoulders
And smiles between
Peach-coloured curtains.

The blonde girl calls out,
More weakly,
Under the yet-barren
Mountain ash
And along the mucky trail
That weaves between
Pussy willows
To the lane.

At the lane she turns to
Glance at the roof,
Searching for a kitten-silhouette
In moonlight.

She ignores her mother's
Frown,
And later, she cries
Herself to sleep
In her hard bed;
She bites down often
And snores.

In the morning
She glares at herself
In the mirror.
She locks the bathroom door,
Shutting out her brother,
Her mother, too.

Today she will wear
Mascara,

Even if her brother laughs
Or her mother disapproves.

She is unskilled
With the little brush.
Her hand shakes,
But she is a determined
Young lady
Today.

The author

Dan Lukiv is a poet, novelist, columnist, short story and article writer, and independent education researcher (hermeneutic phenomenology). His creative writing has appeared in 19 countries. Recently, he has been experimenting with temporal shifts and narrative strings in his haiku and senryu.