Janet I. Buck

Janet I. Buck is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry: Calamity's Quilt, Reefs We Live, Bookmarks in a Hurricane, and Before the Rose (an audio CD graced with the music of David Jackson, Andy Derryberry, and Chris Carmichael of Art Villa Records). She has received numerous poetry awards and her work has appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Southern Ocean Review, PoetrySuperHighway, PoetryMagazine.com, The Rose & Thorn, CrossConnect, In Motion, OffCourse, The Melic Review, Urban Spaghetti, Recursive Angel, Pif, Kimera, and hundreds of print and internet journals world-wide.

Buck is a recent winner of the coveted Kota Press Anthology Contest; this collection is scheduled for release in the Fall of 2001. In April 2000, her poem "Acrylic Thighs" was featured at The United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City. This year, Buck's poetry will be published in the Rockhurst Review, The Amercian Muse, The Carriage House Review, In the Company of Women, The Montserrat Review, Ariga, Southern Ocean Review, and dozens of literary venues around the globe. For links to more of Janet's publications, stop by: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html

Contact Janet I. Buck at: jbuck22874@aol.com

The Cop's Wife

A victim of raw witnessing,
she saw too much. Heard too much.
Living like a waiting log
so near the quick serrated edge.
Always on the lip of lightening
waiting for the strike of death.
Tender jingles of the phone
were buttons on electric chairs,
rivers rising all around.
She'd iron navy uniforms.
Steam would hiss like cornered cats.
A poster child of urban sewers
rumbling through the fetid mud.
An agonizing ritual of
shut the drapes. Chain the door.
Check the locks and check again,
as tongues return to rotted teeth.
Erase a mind of high-speed chase
where trees have turned to tumbleweeds.

At 2 a.m., his shift was done.
A key would turn and she would
melt in gratitude,
slip her thigh between
sharp scissors of his grief.
Rise another wending day,
crack an egg in skillets of her torrid fear.
The chance to love, a prisoner
of chancre and their impotence.
She owned that brand
of pounding heart that
pumped like riggers drill for oil,
hoping wet will meet their hands.
Hers a coy and secret strength
too frail to be spoken of.

Cool Sin

He rolled a tattered old davenport
off a bridge to the creek bed's core.
Leveled it with washed up logs,
made soft cushions from the clouds.
Poured a whiskey, set up camp
on mossy rocks to watch the fish,
their passing fins reflecting stars
like jewels in unsettled prongs.
His skin a heap of muslin shirred,
sweat the scent of summer rain.
Dogwood blossoms floated down-
their ivory fists so lightly clenched
they could be open envelopes.

Wind tickled like a paintbrush
skimming rising grass, cares so few
he'd count them on a thumb-less hand.
He listened to the belching frogs,
currents foaming fruited wish.
All the roads just bobbins
spinning feeble threads.
People were just dirty diapers
messing up the ambience --
the only corner of this quilt
batting of his mind despised.
Evening seemed a cool sin
to drag through forests of a lung.
Nothing but the moon for glare.
Sense of power -- brief, cirrose.

Chatting Over Tragedy

I am stripped down to shorts over metal parts,
honing my will for motion's charge.
It's no damn waltz; I'm laughable.
The gym is empty but for us
and so you curl the trillion dollar question mark:
"Is that an artificial limb?"
I could be bugs against the glass.
Pummeled by this little death.
A body's paste accumulates.
Sweat makes rivers of my arms.
Trails of tendons form a pit.

I lift my lids, break the coiled concentrate
that takes my bones on paths of dream.
Out comes your apology
before my mouth has time to shape
inviting smiles that open hopeful parachutes:
"I know a man who's lost both legs;
he's 51 and lying in an ICU;
he will not speak, he will not eat;
he will not dicker with the dawn."
We chatter over tragedy.
I read you menus of my own.
Telling seems to lighten them.
Perhaps there's water in this well,
even if it's coffee rings on normal tables
basking in their luxuries.

Pain can be a fence in mud.
Chancre is a cornered bird
in rooms we never knew were there.
He'll need a shoulder for these wounds
that took a batch of cashmere flesh,
scorched it slabs of blackened toast.
You tell me stories of gangrene
and diabetic loneliness.
I scribble digits of my phone
as if that number might be clues
or corners of a puzzle's square.
I see his crutches near the bed
like noble firs he's jealous of.

He's half way over continents in Illinois;
I've been inside his pillow case,
juggling his jail cells, frail in his severance
and salty frown, scraps of doves
that smash against a speeding car.
Courage is a chunk of stew surrounded by
stringy stalks of green but wilted celery.
That night of black obsidian,
a common crow I know as well
as letters of an alphabet.
That marbling, this ray of light,
seems so sparse it
it might be vapor from a cloud.

This Impotence

"Green leaves on a dead tree is our epitaph--
green leaves, dear reader, on a dead tree."

Cyril Connolly (1903–74)

Sober thresholds seem like threats.
Their doors (your eyes) with closing lids.
Just once I want to stand
on tables of old grief.
Watch masks slide off like running mice.

Take ashes from my mother's urn--
stir them in a coffee cup.
You'll claim I've poisoned leaving rites.
That's all we know for camels' humps,
this hoarding of the brutal sadness
slicing suns behind your back.

Pain oxidized and left a mark.
Liquor always scrubbed our hands.
We knew no other way to bathe.
I've learned from tea bags of your eyes
that dry is light, more portable
than lunch pails of wet honesty
with ugly worms in apple cores.

You'll tell me you are over her--
you have no dreams of
brushing toes beneath
white whipping cream of sheets,
no memory of apron strings
and negligees like nooses
hugging twitching necks.

You'll say she didn't rule your heart,
sanctify your happiness.
And I will flip the batter's dime,
swallow edges of the burn,
pick at conches of your ears
until I hear the parting lips
of Arnold's melancholy sea.

Prongs & Jewels

We are at that age where
champagne flutes our bodies were
are slivered glass and gray remains.
Years have stolen sonnets some,
left us in a smarter class,
blackboards grazed by fingernails.
A pier we hope will grow some moss
and blanket every pebble lodged.
This lunch about a woman's death,
how Cancer ate her organs
in a carnivorous swirl, but a musical score
stayed scribbled there which drew you to the mass
and match of winded candles flickering.
How crazy illness made her hands,
grabbing every dress and shoe,
each skirt and sock, a layer's fading memory
to try on once before she died.
A polyester cotton gin on closet floors,
a weak mutation of this dark you had
the strength to chisel with a warm embrace.
Just knowing you were there at night
was moving heavy furniture.

This lunch about your love for her
that puts your tears in slot machines;
all that flowed through rivers
of elastic arms stretched to meet
a bloated waist of someone else's suffering.
Fluffing pillows, punching them
behind her back, pretending you
weren't losing steam like irons
God unplugs from walls.
That all your cords were working ones.
Lining up necessities -- these ducks
this day of pain would shoot.
Returning hope to mantles falling in the fire;
their dust a measure of the sea.
You have lost a lot of weight but do not know
dimensions of a scurvy heart.
Lesser women would have picked a silk
excusing scarf or two, sported plastic jewelry,
ignoring sapphires of the bleak
that lend white moons their ivory.