by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

by Hayley Mitchell Haugen

at least we are safe in our homes.
She thinks of her own mother
during the Blitz—four kids,
and bombs dropping, sandbagging
the incendiaries, the rationing,
evacuating to awful conditions,
and the “doodlebugs?” I think of shabby
Ohio hotels, the lice my sons brought home
from preschool. But really, the Nazi missiles
looked like small planes, Vengeance Weapons,
they called them, buzz-bombs, fired
by the hundreds into south-east England each day,
their jet engines whirring like a field of common insects:
when the motors cut out, the bombs fell.
Imagine having that fear constantly,
my mother says. Once, my Nana heard
that tell-tale stop and her body did the thinking:­
she threw the infant—my mother—
into the indoor shelter just before the blast,
just before the glass doors exploded.

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Hayley Mitchell Haugen holds a PhD in English from Ohio University and an MFA in poetry from the University of Washington; she is Professor of English at Ohio University Southern in southeastern Ohio. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag Publishing Company (2018) is her first full-length poetry collection, and her chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press (2016). She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online (https://sheilanagigblog.com/) and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.