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Poetry || SubmissionsChief of Grief: Six Poems by Janet I. BuckAn Angel in Our Muddy Snow Sun out. Still cold. Dry ice sticky edge of mourning sweating through my summer shorts. Your bedroom had ammonia scents. A grieving outhouse full of flies my hands and smiles were swatting at. I shouldn't have left you as you slept. Nurses ‘round a stopping clock could not have stroked you peacefully. Your passing was colliding cars in accidents my eyes refused to validate. I'd written a letter to read to you. Full of loving summaries to wedge between the cracks of death like credit cards in cheap motels. The syllables weren’t sitting right. God was slowly snatching you and I was hatching desperate eggs. I stared down walls like women peel potato skins; yours was slipping through my grip. All the layers of memories turning avocado black by too much weakness in my seed. When you went, I crusted over same as oatmeal sulking on a breakfast tray, my greediness for cheerfulness refused to let me penetrate. I skimmed its scum again, again like children ride a Ferris wheel. It took three years to write a word. Your life was made of peacock plumes, angels spread in muddy snow. No matter how I publish you, serve you tea in china cups that rattle with the verve of loss, sugar bowls aren't full enough-- I'm always miming miracles. The Funeral Right Two scrapbooks lay open in margins of a casket's shadow treating dying differently. One is stoic; one is straight. One is brick; one is clay. I hate to own our bunker life; honesty's fuhrer isn't nice. Here we have the abscess grief. All these bugs inside a bubble, dodging moons with piercing rays. Afraid to land on real times. Craving passive oxygen. This judgment seat begins to itch. Take down screens, break a window, anything. We'll use our feet to sweep raw glass. We step across each other's tears-- their corpses merely muddy possums sitting in a drying ditch. Family knots that should be braids. Deceased should gather what’s alive, bring it to epitome. Match of liquor stays our bunker drowning out impending depth. A false sense of brightness rules. I want to live in the other text, one truer to the inside pain; not glued to spraying nests of bees. They have grown from stings and swells, earth rebuilt from tidal waves, gracing the ground with poignancy. Their widows are loved and held and patted to sleep, not some spider on a sill. The Peg-legged Pirate It was a nick-name hurled only at wit's end. When I'd broken a toy or fallen, trying out your bikes. Those mansions living a secret life in dusty paradise garage. It was pained reach unplugging frustration's toilet bowl. The shape of me in Christmas snow-- an awkward unangelic thing. My legs in cones of weak sorbet that didn't match your GI Joes with muscles planted evergreens, staunch and eager hopefulness at blizzards of a sexy prom. I'd hop to your room to play a game, a bleeding rabbit running red on ivory carpet, ink blot ugly tainting dream. Calling me things that might cut back like jagged glass, when it hurt so much to watch me walk. My metal parts were always scratching leather up. The saddle of try would test your patience-- stretch fiber to its breaking point. You were left with twirling strings of a missing shoe on a sister who should have been you know whole; truth breaks like shrapnel from a bomb. As labels go, it had nothing to do with oceans, ships, or money’s empty treasure chest. Just silence of difference bellowing scream. Boomeranged Dalmatian spots glued upon an unmatched dark. Certain Weights "I feel like I'm living in a giant hole and I wanna be dead. Too." It was all packed into punctuation’s kick. Your house is that snake pit of memorabilia lingering like twilight on windless beach. We bench-press silence, pull a tendon, try to sit, come unglued, start fidgeting. When someone calls to stroke weak oars of helplessness, words seem poked balloons of blood. You're thumbing through old birthday cards and raining upon a thin parade. When will widow dust become bent willow limbs of reminisce? Every room his feet walked through-- a body cast for muscles pinned. We go outside to tend the flowers. Chimes upon the patio used to sing like goblets filled with rosy wine. Aqua is an element. He over-watered every pot. A fact you argued through scissored night. Time was hair spray for your love. Nozzle lost. An empty can. The black procession come and gone. Make-up washed away by tears. His voice remains on message tapes. Erasing it is heavier than scooting over Plymouth Rock. The Awkward Anniversary It’s the right thing at the wrong time. A year has passed since we ran gold rings over bright staunch blissful carrot pipes of eager fingers fidgeting. Made love all night like rising bread. I cannot inflate today as I should-- sour taste of flat champagne-- for a man has died and left his widow, stalking spider twisted, choked by dulcet tears, rummaging a window sill. She's dusting around his death in piles; my joy would be her smelly rag. I'd celebrate the us, but it just seems such a wounded horse, suffering italicized. Double bold injustice done. Making sadness bench-press more than listening can ever lift. I steal a kiss from your waxen lips like pillows off a borrowed couch, lick your skin, embracing a base of sugar cane in the last drop of whippable cream. Our destiny has not reached muffled possible. Its purity a cameo I wear around my aching neck. I change my Will and leave my assets in your hands. Nothing I could give to you would ever brighten ridden night, make the grief of losing us gallop faster toward the end. You held the sunlight anyway, like sweet trombones of daffodils. Money's sharp accessories-- a closet full of empty shoes. The Plain Woman Down the Street We thought this plain woman down ordinary street was an air-head from the waning Sixties-- rocking to the beat of penniless, a snappy monarch dancing in a weed patch with her index finger beheading a dead petunia patch. She'd look up to talk at the birds-- seemed to pull them from sky blue like yarn woven in a busy skein. I'd ask now what she witnessed, but tongues seem fire-less flies-- body bracelet losing its charm. My summer shorts are figurines of childhood past with lipstick smiles for faded tags. I'm now too old to look around beyond the circle of immediate step. I concentrate on present rust. Now, back to Maggie's clothes, farming fingers playing in omnipresent mud. She dallied while we worked and upgraded sedans from barely used to brand new, then bigger, then smaller, never content. In cloud nets around a lunar slit, we made dollar signs in greasy gray and hoped it wouldn't rain on our luck. Passed years like gas and wondered what we ate to make our yards look so colorless, so dry. Water is part of the bucket now. When stairs climb us, our backs are bent. When the chief of grief arrived and we hit that age where every other car is a black limo with a big thick space for you know what--we saw her flower. This plain woman down the street. Neighbors had strokes in strings spinning like lost rosaries, and she was spritzing their arid ways, sailing cookie tin tops to their patio doors, leaving margarine tubs of Jello consistent with all saggy breasts. Cleaning their toilets on Saturday faster than those old toys flushed, folding towels like envelopes for letters we never bothered to send. Her corn husk arms were growing thin, no thinner than our Gucci shoes. And we would be silently mumbling things, stuck on the sticky piano note of spirit stretch we saw but missed. Wondering in longing streaks as spiders fill an attic's bed: would butterflies attend our wake? Janet Buck has a Ph.D. in English and teaches writing and literature at the college level. Her poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in A Writer's Choice, Born Magazine, Stirring, The Melic Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, San Francisco Salvo, Apples & Oranges, Ceteris Paribus, In Motion, Pogonip, Peshekee Review, Thunder Sandwich, The Suisun Valley Review, The Red Booth Review, The Poetry Kit, Miserere, Niederngasse, Lynx: Poetry from Bath, The Horsethief's Journal, Salon D’Aarte, Pif, The Dragonfly Review, Morpo, Recursive Angel, Big Bridge, Eclect ica, Pith, La Petite Zine, EWG Presents, and, of course, Ariga, as well as hundreds of other journals world-wide. In 1998, 1999, and 2000, she has won numerous creative writing awards and been a featured poet for Seeker Magazine, Poetry Today Online, Vortex, Conspire, Poetry Cafe, Dead Letters, the storyteller, Poetry Heaven, Athens City Times, Poetic License, 3:00 AM e-zine, Poetry Super Highway, Carved in Sand, Poetry Magazine.com, Beachfire Gathering, and Cafe Society. Two of Buck's poems have been nominated for this year's Pushcart Prize in Poetry and she is a recent recipient of The H.G. Wells Award for Literary Excellence. To read more of Janet's work or schedule a reading, go to http://www.janetbuck.com You can write to her at JBuck22874@aol.com Today's Situation
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