Pollen fills the springtime, irritating my eyes and nose. Its fine yellow dust salts the windshield and hood of your car. The car needs a wash, the ache in my sinuses rotating like scrub brushes along my zygomatic bones. So I ask you to take the car to be washed, my nose swollen and wet, but today you paid the electric bill, folded our laundry, and want to relax with You Tube shorts. You go, you tell me. I want my Zyrtec to work first and not be violated by plants’ ejaculate aching for stigma. But I take the car to the wash (because love, right?), where histamine billows through my body like soapy puddles, while brushes scrub the windshield. Powerful water jets pulse debris away, bits of bug and twig. The line’s tied up behind me, cars also yellowed with the effluvium of male flowers. They queue up while my nose drips with snot, the hoses spraying like sneezes on metal and glass. Then, the overhead brushes rise like thrones, protecting me in an undersea cove, tentacles of fabric and rubber whipped across. An underwater escape before the automated system blinks an assent to start the wax buff for a hard shine. A sign indicates “YES” to pull forward, and I want to watch it all again, pollen rinsing away and kinked into rivulets down the windows. I text you: You need to try this. Something like ASMR on YouTube but better in person, like you’re Triton, immersed in the scent of control and sounds of a tide. You think it’s weird and make no promises as usual. How stupid in love we once were, how this would have been fun together. Between laughter and beer. A soft press of my hand on your skin. Now it’s routine to be routine. We’ve gotten lazy. It’s predictable like spring and sneezes, this familiar love.

The ache rotating
wet but tied up and whipped, YES!
I want kink, on skin.

Publisher’s Note:

“Ache, with pollen and kink” is MacQ’s first burning haibun. This new-to-me poetic form was invented in 2017 by torrin a. greathouse, a poet and essayist who teaches at Pacific Lutheran University. The burning haibun is a triptych: prose poem plus free verse plus haiku (the latter of which seems to be, in most examples I’ve read thus far, a 5-7-5 micro-poem instead); with each successive part created from the previous via erasure.

To learn more about the genesis of this form, see Writing from the Ashes: On the Burning Haibun by torrin a. greathouse in Poetry (3 July 2023), excerpted from her collection of poems Wound from the Mouth of a Wound (Milkweed Editions, 2020).

Elisabeth Preston-Hsu’s

writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Bellevue Literary Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, Dillydoun Review, CALYX, The Sun, and elsewhere. She was a runner-up in North American Review’s Hearst Poetry Prize 2022, judged by Natalie Diaz. She is a physician in clinical practice in Atlanta, Georgia.

Find her on Instagram: writers.eatery