Artichokes
All the years of pressure cookers
rocking on the stove.
My belly full of finding ways
to dance around your piercing eyes
that rested like a robin’s eggs
on fences leaning in the dawn.
Moments split like stale nuts
your daughters always gathered up
and tried so very hard to save.
The cookie dough we made from scratch
your mouth would burn when
something wasn’t done your way.
Anger wasn’t dialogue
or teeter totters working hard.
The back and forth of sanding down
the lonely nights we spent
together in our bed.
Back to very bitter back
like bookends on a naked shelf.
Nothing there to hold our dreams
like photos with a broken frame.
Artichokes and arguments.
Love and steaks were never right.
I trimmed the thorns and
cooked the leaves in bitter wine
until my life was mush.
And when the green of little girls
was hauled away like
wrecks of cars beside the road,
I threw the leaves in garbage cans.
I had to save my soul.
The Bruise
Looking back like dandruff
falling on my sleeve,
I wonder how I smiled.
Tire tracks upon the floor
from gurneys rolling sterile halls.
Yet another surgery that left
its stripes like badges on a uniform
I’d rather not have worn.
Cotton threads of bathroom towels.
My bandages in times of war.
Denial’s fluff I raised like flags.
Their terry flesh the draperies
I wrapped around the storm.
A stump was candor’s ugly face
like roaches climbing up the walls.
Its wrinkles etched. Machete eyes
that felled my dreams like dominos
or winter tombs upon the grass
that strike at night and smash the dawn.
The silent eyes that said enough.
Like bruises on potato skins
that relegate remaining flesh
to open mouths of garbage cans
that stay below the kitchen sink.
Letting someone touch me there
was overheated coffee mugs I should
have known would burn my tongue.
Garlic pushing through a press,
its presence stronger, losing form.
I guess I smiled to dig a moat
around the walls I couldn’t climb.
The Chill
In honesty, it started in a pile of weeds.
The blasphemy of plastic limbs
that laid like toothpicks on the floor
I needed them to walk to school.
To make a bed I hated so
since it would promise nakedness
like flames that burn a candle
to the quick and leave it there to cool.
The bathroom mirror. Its slippery glass.
I couldn’t take the single shoes
that didn’t have a foot to match
and break its shallow frame.
I wanted to. I needed to.
But there were rules that certain things
would never see the sun.
The shower door. Its hinges weak.
From all the years of grabbing glasses
filled with wine to dull the pain
and steady me in raging waves of doubt.
Like castor oil or medicine I had to take
and swallowed down like bumble bees
that landed where they shouldn’t go.
The sting was there. My throat was raw.
From sucking air of stoic smiles
that chilled me to the missing bones.
If you wonder why I sleep
beneath a quilt in summertime,
you haven’t turned your head to look
beneath the bed of scars.
by Janet I. Buck