MY HAPPINESS EMBLAZONED

in another woman came on board the bus today carrying a string bag of blood oranges, her lips like red cuffs on the sleeve of her throat.

Commuters in our winter coats sit like spools of black and blue thread, the shock

of a Monday workday freezing our morning faces. I envy her, wrapped in a woven shawl of colors like a choir of crayons in a cardboard box. For months, I’ve tried to pull my heart up like a heavy stone from a well of disappointment.

Standing, she flirts with the driver in a foreign language that clicks like knitting needles. Her animated voice fills the corridor with warmth that might melt the blue slush on the floor mats. Laugher opens her mouth to a diva’s O plucking a high C

like a cherry from a tree.

Down the aisle she comes, floating by our plastic pews. As if happiness has a hand

on her breast, as if happiness is taking her body apart in pieces of dazzled joy, and putting her together again before our eyes.

Her fragrance is summer in the deep South—jasmine blossoms white as the snow on

roofs of empty buildings. She is rickrack on a funeral dress; a peacock’s tail fanned against a gray wall; a handful of bright corn to feed the wild birds.

She carries my happiness with her. She smiles with a candle’s lick of flame

that doesn’t leave when it lights another.

The sun shoots golden arrows through the dirt-pocked windows. I stand; I stop the bus with a tug on the white cord; sail out the accordion doors, shoulders back. On my lips, what she gave me—the bulb of a smile to plant in another stranger passing through

our harried and hopeful world.  

Margaret Hasse, originally from South Dakota, makes her home in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Margaret has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as two fellowships from the McKnight Foundation through the Loft Literary Center. She has published several books of poems, included Milk and Tides (Nodin).