Sweet

We're proud to feature this poem from Christina Hauck’s chapbook An Angel and Other Poems, which was selected by Olatunde Osinaike as a finalist of The Headlight Review’s 2025 Poetry Chapbook Contest.

I cut my hair short as a boy’s and lounged
by the river with other naked women,
all of us laughing and talking with hands
and with mouths, wading in and out of the water,

shining. Your eyes took me in. I sifted,
sand through my fingers, soft and warm.
You peeled a mango, slipped dripping slices
between my lips, tasted sweet strangeness

on my chin. O sweet the days we played
by the river and sweet the nights in your room,
mornings when don’t go you’d unbutton
my blouse, gather me in.

The day you showed up late wearing leather,
chain-smoking unfiltered Camels, I guessed
what you would say hours before you would say it,
your tongue loving the sound of her name: Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. Same as my grandmother.
I cried a little, driving home across the bridge.
I remember you wore a red beret and I was always so
impatient at your before-the-mirror adjustments

sometimes taking minutes. Sweet, sweeter
than anise, I remember your lower lip caught
between your teeth as you rose from the river
silver streams of water pouring from your hair.

This piece was featured in Volume 3, Issue 2. Click here to explore other pieces from this issue.

Christina Hauck

Christina Hauck is a retired English professor. Her poems have appeared in many small journals, including The Beloit Poetry Journal, Berkeley Poetry ReviewCalifornia QuarterlyCoal City ReviewCollateralFive Fingers ReviewFlint Hills ReviewLast Syllable, and others. Her book manuscript, "Dying to Reach You," was a finalist for the 2024 Barry Spacks Prize. "An Angel and Other Poems," was recently short-listed for the Headlight Review 2025 Poetry Chapbook Prize. She’s been nominated many times for a Pushcart Prize, most recently by Coal City Review. And she is a Yaddo fellow. Born and raised in Alameda County, California (Ohlone), Christina now lives on unceded land of the Kaw Indians in Lawrence, KS, with her wife, Margaret, and several smaller mammals. Christina's current project, tentatively titled "Bad Deeds," is a long sequence of poems unpacking the legacies of white privilege/supremacy, Indigenous displacement/genocide, and African enslavement/emancipation within her family history. 

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