SURVIVAL IS A FUNCTION OF PREPAREDNESS

I am six years old and a woman five times

my age approaches me. On the blacktop

of the elementary schoolyard we are sound-

tracked by morning birdsong but otherwise alone.

She gives me a baseball bat. She asks me

to hold the bat at its handle, tight against

the asphalt; from the side, she proceeds

to hammer a nail through the bat’s thick tip.

When she has finished, she flips my palm and

spreads the tiny fingers of my tiny child hand.

The nail protrudes from the bat like a beak,

weaponized and ready. The woman gifts me

the object we made together: “Go into the world,

make this useful.” How I wish I would have learned.

Clare Louise Harmon is a poet and music educator. She is the author of The Thingbody (Instar Books, 2015/2020). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Sixth Finch, The Sycamore Review, Storm Cellar, The New Delta Review, and elsewhere. Recently, she completed a residency at Can Serrat in El Bruc, Spain where she continued her work on Mozart's alla turca music and the aesthetics of plural apocalypse. She lives and works in New Orleans.