Tara Campbell’s debut novel, TreeVolution, was released Nov. 1 from Lillicat Publishers. All this week on Queen Mob’s Teahouse we celebrate Campbell’s book by showcasing her work.
Breakfast of Champions
in Columbia Heights
Bowl at my feet
spoon stilled
Lucky Charms shipwrecked in an ocean of milk
on a stoop
unaccompanied save for a hollowed-out pack of
Marlboros
consumer long departed
in search of destiny
and, perchance, wings
Mt. Pleasant Haiku
Hydrangeas disrupt
my power walk. I stop and
bend to better scents.
Chicken bones rattle
on brick, amuse bouche before
fortified dinner
Man grunts frustration
Paper flutters to sidewalk
Lottery ticket
Dinner with a view
of the Orkin truck, but hey,
it’s still happy hour
Gentrification:
Little Free Libraries start
outnumbering bars
Not the same now, since
baby strollers found the end
of my bus ride home
The troubadour shouts
His songs into the morning
Mariachi rage
Breakfast en plein air:
Lucky Charms shipwrecked in milk
Marlboro chaser
Convenient Store, please
don’t change your sign. Convenience
isn’t everything.
Park Road’s grandest dame
wears yellow crayon scribbles
and tricycle art
Screen-lit faces of
Pokemon hunters drive the
drunks to drink elsewhere
Park Road Painted Lady
The grandest dame of Mt. Pleasant
stands on leaf-green lawn,
adorned in daffodil yellow with bands of orange
and splashes of lime.
Candy-red tricycles sport in a pyramid before her,
rainbow flags flutter from her porch,
a canary crayon scribbles up her firm brick side.
Just around the corner
brave belle of the ball
highlight of the hood
loud, proud and enduring
the fairest of them all.
Tara Campbell is a Washington, DC-based writer of crossover sci-fi. Originally from Anchorage, Alaska, she has also lived in Oregon, Ohio, New York, Germany and Austria. Tara is the grateful recipient of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities’ (DCCAH) 2016 Larry Neal Writers’ Award in Adult Fiction, and the DCCAH31st Mayor’s Arts Award for Outstanding New Artist. She’s an assistant fiction editor at Barrelhouse, and her monthly column at the Washington Independent Review of Books, Text in the City, covers all things books and writing in the DC area.