KARISSA CARMONA

 

Alternative Questions for the HUD Homelessness Survey

Bitterroot Family Campground, January 2022


1. What is your name?

and how’d you come by it?
did your mother

cup her hand and dip
into the soft dark of a

dream? family bible?
cosmos? did she fall

in love with a foreign
word for the moon? or

were you the first to know
yourself? to hook that

sound from your throat,
let it fill your mouth and

eat eat eat of its richness.


2. What is your age?

i.e., your mileage, your baggage.

which is your favorite, most pearlescent

scar? the one you fiddle with like a loose tooth, or
wedding band. the one that pinks when you press
on it. that you mark in crude initials with your thumb-
nail. the one that your blood remembers just as sure
as the day you were opened up.


3. Where will you sleep tonight?

what will you wake to?

first light refracted
in the car windows,
dew-dripped in your breath?

chapped lips, crusted
tear-ducts,

your bladder?
full, panging, warm.
the dog

sighing her own complaints

outside: dry cold,
dawn over the
Sapphires– faintly,

Venus.

how long do you think before it fades in the sun?


 

Haibun for Missed Band Recital

I would have to call my band teacher in the morning and tell him I wouldn't make it. That one of our tires had burst on the far side of Chief Joseph pass. Maybe, that a rancher had towed us to the nearby hot springs. That my parents had stayed up all night treading water, counting their losses in snowakes they caught on their tongues. What really happened was this: Mom took the keys on the way home from Grandma’s. Made Dad sit shotgun. Have you ever told a drunk he can’t drive? He beat his palms against the dashboard. He yanked the steering wheel. Her hair. He opened his door and drank from the dark swell of air it carved for him. The stars were out. The rumble strip sang in my teeth. We pulled into a Safeway lot. He snapped Mom’s iPhone in two, threw it on the ground in glinting halves. Got out. Ran. Into a wheat field, I think, and we would find him before daylight, sorry and chattering, one pant leg ripped to the knee. And Grandma would come. And we would sit at her kitchen table, stare into butter-stained toast as he, in the bathroom, wretched out his sins. Like last time. Like always. But first, I would sit in the Safeway bathroom. The woman mopping would slosh graciously over to the Mens’. Leave me alone. To fold into my knees, fake pine scent, the thrum of an exhaust fan, myself,

imagine the heat
of stage lights, the pale-moon
whine of clarinets.

 

Karissa Carmona lives in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley where she works as a community organizer. She is the winner of the 2022 Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry. Her work is featured or forthcoming in journals including CutBank, Los Angeles Review, New York Quarterly, and Lily Poetry Review.