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Poetry || SubmissionsWhite LinenBy Janet I. Buck The sheets were folded perfectly like napkins on a table-top. Pain would be another absolutely uninvited guest. One that stayed when all the smiles turned and left. Absorbing strength. Slicing courage to the quick. Being there was oxygen that gave her heart a way to breathe. He knew he had to stay. The cattle drive of helplessness. Futile tongues that merely wagged and couldn’t lick the ache away. Joints like rusted engine parts that only felt the twist and shout of looking for the sun. She seemed so far away at times. Smothered by the truth of bones that snapped like crayons just because. Sharing pain is wearing it. They didn’t have to speak. Words were spray from gravel roads or cotton balls to incubate the tender ears from howling winds and knobs of fear that rattled on misfortune’s door. In his eyes she heard him scream: “White linen should be clean and fresh and new and bright. Not the walls of prison cells that staple wings of butterflies to wrinkled pages of the night and never let them soar.” Artichokes All the years of pressure cookers rocking on the stove. My belly full of finding ways to dance around your piercing eyes that rested like a robin’s eggs on fences leaning in the dawn. Moments split like stale nuts your daughters always gathered up and tried so very hard to save. The cookie dough we made from scratch your mouth would burn when something wasn’t done your way. Anger wasn’t dialogue or teeter totters working hard. The back and forth of sanding down the lonely nights we spent together in our bed. Back to very bitter back like bookends on a naked shelf. Nothing there to hold our dreams like photos with a broken frame. Artichokes and arguments. Love and steaks were never right. I trimmed the thorns and cooked the leaves in bitter wine until my life was mush. And when the green of little girls was hauled away like wrecks of cars beside the road, I threw the leaves in garbage cans. I had to save my soul. Mockingbirds The lullaby of tragedy. The mockingbird of letting all the anger out. Mooning all the syllables I thought I couldn’t wander near. Scratches on a missing knee. The cake I thought would never rise. Without the stoic eggs I stored in cartons of my soul. Coffee mugs of all the times you listened like the open sky. Held the heavy lids on coffins of my broken dreams so I could look inside. Let me kick a moment’s ice across our kitchen floor. Took the mop of loving arms and laid it on my swollen eyes like sympathetic bags of tea and mats beside the shower door. Knowing just how hard it was to wipe the feet I didn’t have. To take the hose of faith and fill the bucket all alone. Just how hard it had to be without the muscles of your heart to stir the sands of bitter words and push them out to sea. Janet Buck teaches writing and literature at the college level and has published over ninety poems in a variety of journals, magazines and anthologies across the United States. Two of her poems, “The Nursing Home” and “The Arietta,” have won second place awards in the National Library of Poetry’s contests in 1996 and 1997. You can write to her care of jbuck@22874@aol.com More poems by Janet Buck Today's Situation
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