Signature Hamartia by Lana Maht Wiggins

Here in the common halls of substance,
labyrinth green with serenity and despair
mingled and anti-depressed numb...

it seems holocaustic madness is tolerable after all.
This is, after all, my dream.
Illusions I cooked up myself over a weak fire
and a circle of rare stones.
Twisting skeleton keys in academic doors
until the last on the left opened with surreal ease.
But ill-timing, my signature hamartia,
often places me at naturally rebellious front lines,
meandering on frowns of fortune
and downdraft swerves,
scraping elbows and knees in another occasion
to cheat the reaper's fist by a nick
of something more consistent than time.
One never knows when a dream will turn on you.
Take you from ambrosial transcendence
to category 4 forces of will against yours
in a single rapid eye movement.
Dragging core and psyche to mortal boundaries
only to dump you at Hades gates in a box-truck,
holding a manual scripted in Coptic ideograms
and no compass to navigate home.
I cannot wake from this dream just yet--
because I no longer seep anger on the world
or myself for the lack of synchronicity between us--
and shifting at 46 mph with a drink in your hand,
a poem in your head
a storm on your back is difficult, if not impossible.

BIO: Lana Maht Wiggins currently resides in New Orleans, LA where she is an Instructor of English at the University of New Orleans. She earned her Master's degree in Creative Writing from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2001. Lana received the Judge Felix Voorhies Award for Creative Writing and the Jon Z. Bennet Award in The Deep South Writer's Conference Poetry Contest. Lana Maht Wiggins has been published in The Southwestern Review, Poems for a Livable Planet, The Deep South Writer's Chapbook, Dance to Death, Words-Myth, and Knock. These poems are from her recently completed manuscript, Notes From Refuge, which she began writing weeks before Katrina hit New Orleans, and completed during her extended evacuation from New Orleans. Notes From Refuge is currently under consideration for publication in its entirety in 2007. Email: comments@moondance.org