JANET BUCK

Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee. Her poetry has recently appeared in Octavo, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Bohemian Rag, CrossConnect, The Montserrat Review, Offcourse, The Pedestal Magazine, The Muse-Apprentice Guild, Adagio Verse Quarterly, MiPo, Facets Magazine, and hundreds of journals worldwide. Tickets to a Closing Play, her second collection of poetry, won the 2002 Gival Press Poetry Award and is available through Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. Janet's third book, Beckoned by the Reckoning, is scheduled for release later this year.

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THESE DAYS IN ICU

To my daughters, slumped
and weeping in two chairs:
I'm pressed against these stiff
and unforgiving sheets --
unable to talk, squeeze your hand,
crush it with my messages
urgent as sirens bearing no noise.
You're holding open final pages
of a book when it simply wants to close.
I'm sorry for these paper cuts,
wounds of love I leave you with,
but let me go,
let the blossom find the earth.
 
Each hour in this boxy room
is a world stretched too thin
to be a river to the sea.
If I could, I'd say to you:
calmly detach the plugs from the wall,
allow my halo of peace to descend.
Machines are squeezing a heart
that simply wants to rest.
Funny, the copies of Rockwell's we nail
in place on crumbling walls.
And I suppose I taught you that.
 
The tongue of a grave
seems simple and right --
a Popsicle stick tattooed by storm,
propped and strong in carapace soil.
Oatmeal clouds will part and smile;
you will discover a reason to sing.
Let my knuckles crease and break
like arms of old geraniums --
go plant the flowers I planned for you.
Pretend my bones are table legs
that stake a rosebush in the wind.

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COLD TEA

Your mother dies slowly;
the carnage of a going rose
inside her veins of midnight blue --
ink spills dropping on a page
you can't take back, cannot turn.
Feckless arms standing by
like leaning stalks of corn
in a season of biting winds.
Tea grows cold as hours grow long;
no one dusts for fear
of stirring layers of ash
in premonitions straight ahead.
 
You all take turns just sitting there,
reading and exchanging glances
spry as sparrows hopping
from one nervous branch
to pillows of a slipping leaf.
Then the empty room: a vacant mattress,
icy marble in a church,
hospice nurses packing up their long IVs,
all part of a path back to a life
missing too much of the yolk of the egg.
The vigil is darkness itself
tapping on windows hoarding the light.