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| Junket in the Spring |
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| Janet Buck |
Changing Lanes
Words can say it now,
now that your clay pots,
spun from Eve dust and teardrop ale,
sit neatly in boxes stacked by the curb.
We were all wrong from the start,
left lane wrong in a city of right dreams.
Moonbeams and a lonely fog
confused my wishful eyes.
We were igloos in heat.
It's always a mess
when a woman works two jobs
and a man rides the living room couch
for a horse, then cannot stare
in the glass of a dirty mirror
or step on the bathroom scale.
When I arrived at 6 p.m.,
I judged you with my sighs --
their biting mistrals
grooming bare rock.
Your two young girls who came
and went on summer days
stretched out my missing uterus,
then left the cave a flat balloon.
Sober kicked the lustless groin
and I awoke to grand mistakes.
Marriage was easier drunk.
We had no plan but tolerance
and tolerance is not amour.
Sweet Then Sour
We drank White Russians in a bar.
Spiked foam was just
a creamy toy to tinker with.
I'd pick a guy I thought was cute;
you would do that tribal dance
of lifting up a slitted skirt --
reel him in like river trout.
Darkness was a game to play.
Who'd have known that liquor's
Pharaoh had such power.
Later he would start to stink --
wadded towels in baskets
with their lids too tight.
Passing out on holidays
like votives clipped of oxygen.
All our dirty laundry sat
while we were busy ironing
starchy collars of our lies.
Who'd have known
the music of a popping cork
would turn into our serenade.
That I would worship bottle gods,
double-bag the evidence
of wine I drank to stay afloat,
stuff it in the Friday trash
as if I knew what day it was.
It started out as lotion
for the cracking dream
and turned into the empty vial.
Who'd have guessed
that you would raise your kids alone,
step around the drunken belch,
stand at midnight in your frock,
making sandwiches from crumbs.
Bio: Five years ago, Janet Buck gave up teaching and picked up a pen. Her checkbook regrets the decision, but her heart doesn't. On good days her poetry can be seen floating around the web; on bad days, she's on the cover of Orthopedic & Fracture Magazine.
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