November 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
I understood your allergies to ivory,
anything close to white. Perhaps it was
a form to sign inside the morgue.
Vivid frost of lonely winters
after cancer shook the house,
left you only furniture
and pitch black night
without much velvet in its grain.
The livid shade of feckless hope,
of failure knocking at the door.
The color was that pat, that clean.
Death is the ultimate bleach.
The parking lot had memories
of times your shoes kicked a tire,
then returned to dust a shelf of china cups
that rattled in an avalanche.
“I’ll call you on the phone,” you said,
“but I can’t walk the ghostly halls.”
I understood the jail rails of steel beds
and gurneys that carry a world away —
then lie and do not bring it back.
That room with little on the walls but
voiding charts and memos to a passing nurse
who had no answers in her hand
but gentle ways to close the book
as raison d’être lost its glue.
I would have picked the dye myself.
Every lily told a tale
of love as poisoned manuscripts.
Anything in dirty chalk
was just too close to missing angels,
open graves, and pale moans.
*First Published in Epiphany
November 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
this image of sid with
GIMME A FIX
scrawled across his scabbed
and bleeding chest
this admission from his mother
that she bought
the shit that killed him
simple pathetic melodrama
that i carry with me for
eighteen years
until all i am is thirty-three and lost
a father driving home from
the sitter’s house after work with
my son laughing in the
back seat
with the sky a smeared glare
through a dirty windshield
and all of my bitter beliefs worn
like a second skin
and do you understand that
poetry isn’t art?
do you care?
and what about the difference
between confession and
sacrifice?
i can’t discuss christ
without thinking of failure
and i’m tired of dissecting my past
i’m tired of the deaths that
have come to shape my life
but if they were taken away
i would only find more
we define ourselves
too easily
by these things we cannot
control
November 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
grey light
edged with purple
the age of dogs returned
the taste of frost
on metal
of rust
the motor grinding against
the sky’s blood
and nothing else
no heat
no motion
no gentle music
a language
but not one you recognize
whispers and screams
nothing in between
and your hands numb
the fingers cracked
and bleeding
the taste of gasoline
a simple violence and
you swallow
October 2002 | back-issues, Janet Buck, poetry
I am the yolki flower, the shade of an egg.
I arrive in a burst, albumen and sack,
after first treasure of rain.
I promise you things.
Your soil is deaf to my voice,
a signal of centering force.
I am Israel’s daffodil, a trumpet the poets
have bellowed through dust.
You are the frost with your habits and hands
holding a gun to temples of peace.
I shimmy with sunlight and birth.
Yet, darkness is all I’m coming to know.
Why are you plodding on trails
of a tomb in the guise and the guess
of slicing an earth meant to be shared.
Insisting on fences and walls kilometers long.
Old battles and shrapnel are eating my leaves.
In other wars, no stones, no wires
were enough to contain a rampage of terror.
A pendulum swings, cracking the clock.
This flavor of hate shrivels my flesh.
Piranhas are grabbing whatever moves.
Our quibbles are ancient sheep
gnawing the throat of an innocent lamb.
It didn’t work for Berlin,
where the Dipper shoveled a grave
and Pleiades became a fixture
of glory removed in bullets exchanged —
where shadows grew sharp,
sticky with blood,
in palettes of crippling swastikas.
*First Published in Offcourse
October 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
there are rooms
in this house filled with
nothing but the black weight
of your past
there are windows pushed
to the point of breaking
and being in love is
being on the wrong side of
a locked door and i
find myself too often forgetting
where i’ve left the sun
i find myself
numbered among the dead
and dying species while
further down some long unused hallway
you cry for the person i’ve
made you become
and we will find each other in
the last fragile seconds
before the sky splits open
and we will stop
our hands will
explore living flesh beneath the
first low mutters of thunder and
our tongues will follow
that we believe this much in
the force of desire
should never be forgotten
October 2002 | back-issues, John Sweet, poetry
we have built
this silence
ourselves
both of us clutching
talismans
in an unfamiliar country
the dogs with a language
the children smiling
but riddled with hatred
some of us pointing guns
others bleeding
and the question is god
the question is
the emptiness of the sky
on any given january
afternoon
there is room enough
beneath it
for all of us to be
wrong
************
prev published in Stickman Review
