Issue 11

Summer 2002

Janet Buck

Janet Buck is a three-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Three Candles, PoetryBay, Red River Review, The Foliate Oak, Ariga, Runes, Savoy Magazine, Artemis, Sand to Glass, Stirring, The Concrete Wolf, Poetry Magazine.com, Pierian Springs, sidereality, The Carriage House Review, Facets, Kimera, The Pedestal Magazine, The American Muse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. Recent awards include Sol Magazine's 2001 Poem of the Year, The 2001 Kota Press Anthology Prize, The Thunder Rain Award, and first place in Kimera's Poetry Contest 2001.

For links to more of her work, see:

http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html
http://www.janetbuck.com

 

Strange Duets

First crickets. Then hiccupping frogs.
A bird rattles a tree.
Daylight lines the yard like lace.
Just below a gutter's lip
on rooftops baking in the heat,
a swarm of hornets work their cones.
The sugar of bees is clear enough
to everything but human salt.
"It was a good year for corn,"
I write, "but not for us ...
eaten by bugs, reduced
to the husk of the dream."
My thighs are slapping
with ancient storms,
ones that ebbed so long ago,
they shouldn't matter but they do.
They shouldn't weight my eyes with rocks.

This tripping dance of plastic keys --
an awkward straining opera
stumbling some note of grief.
Determined I can make it sing
before the stairs of death
confront me with ice and no rails.
Rain raps on the window pane
whispering of hours I missed.
"Is anyone home in this cavernous hole?"
It questions the tin can glass.
Under the deck, a hinge of sound
in musical strobes too obvious
to hold a page that might
have been an unsteamed mirror.
Our puppy slams the keyboard shut,
pulls at my socks with playful teeth.
Puts the box in sleeping mode
with the flick of her anxious tail.
She knows somehow that suns
aren't jars of mustard seeds
to stash on racks and never use.

 

Forgiving This Soil

You are face to face with old.
I need to forgive this soil,
this drought -- blades of our
mean flip words, lean
as a tenderloin
perfectly shaved
in order to sell
to the emptiness.
Our fat, our grief
turned upside down
so no one will see.
I grab the white, white flag
of a page, but it trips
intention into speech.
I will never have
a mother in you.
Its fabric goes raw and bleeds.

As a family friend trickles
her blood on the stone of her grave,
you babble about
something you bought
and can't exchange
at a Brooks Brothers store.
Is Palm Springs
the only well you know?
Where is the rain we deserve,
the desert our agony earned.
I turn to a bull
with pointed horns.
Wishing the skirt of your flesh
could promise me more,
more genuine color.
Immersion foot from petty ponds,
I swell with a tear,
tuck it in socks
that might have walked
through rivers of ominous chill.

© Janet I. Buck

 

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