Janet Buck : two poems
THE PEDICURE
A brand of pain which tells my body
that it moves is something
almost coveted in crazy ways.
Levelers of agony produce
quixotic courage fluid--
molten motto borrowed strength.
Water is a sterling buttress
heralding an inner prayer.
I watch you cope with polio,
using arms to cross the pool.
Parting waves like sweetened
tides of holocaust.
Side-by-side in sex-less struggle.
Our legs are thumbtacks on the floor.
We push sharp will in crumbled cork.
Neither stops the rowing game
to chat about the weather's clouds.
Chlorine tastes like demitasse
and we are wired for rebirth.
Normal is a fuzzy fishbowl
steeped in algae of its ease.
Clues we've earned -
a pedicure for gratitude -
knowing flames of Dante fires -
the one that scorches us the most -
empty basket motionless.
PASSING VERDICTS
I've stalked you with sobriety.
Passed you verdicts of my need
for whirling winds of mindfulness.
Invading space of panther grief--
Pandora's box of loneliness.
"Cold turkey" is a wild one.
Beneath light beer and Chardonnay
such heaviness has firmly ruled.
I wonder: "Am I out of line
for taking a match and setting
ghosts of stranded straw on
fire with their elements?"
For thinking here, past seventy,
the will to drink the past away
can be replaced with orange juice.
My father empties out your stash.
Every drop you pour and hide
he dumps like soggy bales of hay.
Bench press truth is haunting you.
Bar bells falling on your toes.
It comes to swig or conquests
of enduring weathered Parthenons
with bricks of sick and suckers licked
and diving rows of Dominos.
You came to join me for a swim.
The sun emerged through heaving clouds.
I know you see a cyclone's strips
and evidence of hurricanes.
My take is different--
far more optimistic now.
I see your wrinkles filling out.
I see a poet's vertigo.
Janet Buck's has appeared in Gravity, The Doomed City, A Writer's Choice, The Melic Review, The Pittsburgh
Quarterly, Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, and Mind
Fire among hundreds of others. Two of her poems have been nominated for the next Pushcart Prize Anthology. Her
most recent collection is Calamity's Quilt available from Newton's Baby Press.
