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Poetry || SubmissionsPoems by Janet I. BuckThe Cubicle The cubicle has three bleached walls, a cold, blank floor, and a curtain that shrieks like a banshee under the axe the minute a victim is bared to the light. What ought to be colored is not. The hospital gown strikes our eyes as cellophane on ugliness. Olding's given neglig?e bought only by desperate hands. A nurse taps your wrist to bring up a vein, which of course is hiding in fear. A puppy to pet, a pencil to drum, a drink to caress -- some toy would distract us from thirst. I worry the scalpel will slip. When they roll you away, part of me pulls invisible ropes. I twist in a chair like paperclips to pass the unpassable hour. The right bend and a firm wish might be the savior you need for the spine stem drooping as water turns black. A Tuesday sky of sapphire blue paled only by drifting clouds would rescue our grief in better times. But sunlight is a drunken lamp. I go back to the room where people dress in their fears, plant feet on a carpet as if a parade will start if they ask. I should have brought something to knit, some project that knots this dwindling yarn. This Map of Cracks Gifts of motion dangle like old Christmas lights. Not on, but there beneath the hangnail of a moon -- I refuse to take them down. I'm angry at this map of cracks; it ought to be firm skeletons that carry crosses of this world. A drink is a tempting pool to drown the edge of the burning cloth. But I should be that chili corpse that splits and then discovers fire. Will is like a wet cigar; I light it once and worry that I'm wasting matches dreaming of unfettered steps. We're both aware a body's art ain’t permanent. The luck of the canvas is all in the brush. I was handed clotted ones. These hours of blinding agony bludgeon anyone with eyes. And I'm afraid I'm salt in yours. I fight to find a blessing here in the bad binding of a cheap book I'll open again and again 'til it breaks. Call grief food, then swallow it. That lesson permeates our bond -- I wonder how its tether stays the knot it is. How tenderness remains so whole -- left holding the splinter and scream. Drying Paint In that time swatch between sunset, moonrise, starfish glitter on black, the earth sits like a hangnail. I wait for a key to turn in the door. Hours alone work up to the us in a half-assed way -- for love is a mission that counts its dead, then regrets the oversight. Did I finish the painting I wanted to hang on our very last wall when my kiss saluted your lips. The easel won't stay on three legs. The palette won't be eternally moist. The Cellophane Gown A shoulder's valley tempts my chin. But this is a clinic and clinics are cold. Flesh, at best, a fading scarf. Pain is just a menu choice, a checkmark on a common form. I'm broken as slivers of glass in this cellophane gown. A mattress in the going state with wires poking through the cloth. No whistle is left in my pulse. Bored with the font of this grief, a pelvis map of sorry lines turned fissures widened by each step I drink like addicts gulp a beer. The open back invites an artificial breeze. The nauseating headline news above gray X-rays crackling as fingers shift from clip to clip -- "Perhaps it's time for the chair." You say it from two pedestals of working legs -- the length of which make forests worth the wandering. And I withdraw -- fetal style -- grabbing for a robe of strength that hangs in someone else's room. More poetry by Janet I. Buck at Ariga Janet I. Buck is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four poetry collections: Calamity's Quilt, Reefs We Live, Bookmarks in a Hurricane and Before the Rose. Her work has appeared in The Paumanok Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Born Magazine, Ariga, The Rose & Thorn, Pif, In Motion, The Melic Review, and hundreds of print and internet journals world-wide. For links to more of Janet's publications, stop by: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html Today's Situation
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