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This writing was accepted for publication in the 84 page perfect-bound issue... Down in the Dirt magazine (v110) (the September 2012 Issue) You can also order this 5.5" x 8.5" issue as an ISSN# paperback book:

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Lines Between

Christie Lambert

The old man was not satisfied
with today’s stop in Haiti.
And now first in line for standby tickets at the comedy club,
to forget the disgrace of
these young people whizzing around on jet-skis,
here, in the waters Columbus once sailed,
prancing in bikinis around this manufactured port-of-call
with its swept-clean façade of a market.
Him, and his wife, and ten others waiting their turn to laugh
when villages are but a few miles away
where only God knows what conditions are really like
since an official of this hogwash town will stop you
from climbing the fence they’ve erected to keep tourists in.

Here, in the land of mountains,
where he came once before,
he did not come to bounce on an oceanic trampoline
or to dash down the inflatable slide.
No, he most assuredly did not.
He came to walk through the villages,
as he did long ago with his wife and kids,
to see what remained of those memories and
those people with their smiles and beckoning hands.
Those slight boats of livelihood, nets for fish-
those boats nearly broke his heart.

And when the earthquake hit,
hadn’t those faces all returned to his mind
and was it too much to ask to
see more than pre-approved carvings and
well-tended white sand?
The Haitian guide he’d met today said
yes, because there wasn’t much else left
since the rich Americans came down with funds-raised,
snapped their pixels of proof and left with the money.

If this was true, the old man wanted to know.
He could raise a ruckus back home,
oh, yes. He was sure of it.
But they kept an eye on him,
on his wife, too,
and never so insulted as to feel like an
insubordinate child on this trip
(he’d paid his money and good money at that,
too much to be prodded along like sheep into the fold).

His wife pleaded and they walked by well-spaced booths.
He bought one painting in the market;
it caught his eye, the dark blues and greens.
The black smoke that hovered over the mountains
wasn’t in the picture,
but he felt it there in the heaviness of the lines.
The smoke ever-present,
product of charcoal (foundation of this people),
something he cooks with every now and then,
steaks hot on the grill,
standing on the back deck where the fan blows
and there are so many citronella candles
that mosquitoes can’t get close enough to bite.

First in line and a ticket to the comedy club is his,
but the comedian thinks too much of his own jokes
and the old man can’t stop thinking of slender fishing boats lost at sea,
survival marking the clear blue sky, that
one wire fence between fantasy and humanity,
the way they wouldn’t let him cross it,

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