{"id":272,"date":"2011-05-30T16:54:02","date_gmt":"2011-05-30T16:54:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ink.verticalplus.co.uk\/archive\/?p=272"},"modified":"2020-12-14T13:43:52","modified_gmt":"2020-12-14T13:43:52","slug":"a-haibun-from-danny-pelletier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/a-haibun-from-danny-pelletier\/","title":{"rendered":"A haibun from Danny Pelletier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cleavage <\/span>

Stories about his drunk college buddy, who once scaled an impossible geological structure when the rest of the party was looking in the other direction, don\u2019t linger on his tongue. \u201cHow\u2019d you get up there? We only looked away for a minute.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t remember.\u201d Ninth graders of course think this is funny. We chuckle when he tells us about cleavage, the tendency of rock to break along planes of weaknesses. On the first day of class, he projects on the pull-down screen a Peanuts cartoon of Linus squatting, staring as he too squats, stares at Glenda\u2019s chest. Once out of habit I shifted my eyes ahead when scooting my chair forward in another class, my gaze tunneling down the corridor between Glenda\u2019s breasts as she, sitting across from me, was in the throes of the same motion. Preston, her boyfriend, later whispered to me, \u201cI saw what you did.\u201d Yet this man, our teacher, is less timid with his gaze; picture Charles Schulz drawing dotted lines connecting eyes to breasts, as Linus\u2019s eyes are connected to perhaps a football. An observant comic would follow the lines from girl to girl to girl, always skipping the girl in the back row as Family Circus\u2019s Billy might hopscotch the neighbor\u2019s lawnmower. Weeks later the dotted lines rest on my blank homework, and this same teacher speaks words to me, words like brother, college, science. I am only being lazy, rebellious. Sure, I can identify metamorphic rocks no sweat, but why? Already a budding writer, I am more interested in feeling the rough foliations of the human soul. I direct him to the girl in the back row, who struggles daily to scale the crags of the syllabus. \u201cForget about her,\u201d he says. \u201cShe\u2019s a lost cause.\u201d<\/span>

would-have-been mother<\/span>
unsure: gneiss or schist or slate?<\/span>
child\u2019s breasts weeping milk<\/span>



*Danny Pelletier<\/span>'s haibun has appeared in Ink Sweat & Tears, Contemporary Haibun Online and The Raleigh Review. He lives with his wife and two children in central NY, where he teaches writing. This summer, he'll be teaching a workshop on haibun at Hartwick College's Pine Lake Environmental Campus.<\/span>

An earlier version of Cleavage<\/span> appeared in Contemporary Haibun Online<\/span>
<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Cleavage Stories about his drunk college buddy, who once scaled an impossible geological structure when the rest of the party was looking in the other direction, don\u2019t linger on his tongue. \u201cHow\u2019d you get up there? We only looked away for a minute.\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t remember.\u201d Ninth graders of course think this is funny. We […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-272","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-haibun-tanka-haiku-haiga"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24047,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272\/revisions\/24047"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/inksweatandtears.co.uk\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}