Soured Sonnets
Your Chardonnay for apple juice
on counters lining bathroom sinks
fooled my father’s wishing wells
until he grabbed your mourning cup--
took a sip to quench his thirst
and choked on razors of the real.
Its leaning tree, a shaky trellis,
leaving you with empty snails,
dead raccoons and porcupines,
threads of corn husks in a field.
Pulse of greed will win the race,
making horseshoes of your tongue;
you will be its saddlebags.
You clot your cuts with sleeping pills--
rise to battle the battle again.
Brandy by a roaring fire,
mint juleps on the patio--
fertile myths and paperbacks.
Canning emotion like pickled beans
and stacking things on way top shelves.
What used to be a goblet of wine
a little bigger than a thimble--
soon becomes a velvet temple
washing unmet sin away.
Sloshed becomes a toilet’s flush,
the longer the stem, the fewer the thorns.
In crocodile retrospect,
I see I slit my wrists with booze.
Living in the grip of wine
is dog food at a dinner party.
Sonnets of a graceful drunk
grow sour in the steeping song.
Liquor is a sneaky mouse
that does its nibbling in the dark.
Ask Hemingway, who dusted
flat piano keys with barrels
of a loaded gun.
by Janet I. Buck
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Deer Tags
Having dropped despair
like a baby grand piano
over the side of a ship,
I can safely say that
steam-cleaning soiled love,
as fabrics go, rarely
comes back to life.
Resuscitating angry rugs
is pure sand and the
sockets of my eyes are full.
You found ways
to stick sore thumbs
in every concrete dream I poured.
Men wear deer tags.
Touch passion--assuming
they own its fragile neck,
but I make splints.
Get wise. Smother locusts
of memories that haunt me
like outgrown nightgowns
blowing in a graveyard breeze.
For years, the resurrection
came with booze: my hammer,
my nails, my drill, my knife,
my fork, my spoon.
The only reach my body knew.
But sober sheds a brighter light.
I save yeast tears for lesson bread,
turn black eyes into raisins
for cinnamon rolls and
let my hair go wild and gray.
by Janet I. Buck
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Defended Turf
To untrained sense, his patio
was a porch for mud the Cats
would come and scoop away.
He sat in a swing with his check in hand,
counting the zeros his pulse despised,
thinking of sold paradise
and next steps of a nursing home.
Smoking his pipe like prairie grass
and blowing curses at the wind.
Baseball hat on top of bald--
a lampshade crooked on his head,
lamenting the fast right hook of age,
that slow left lift, receding time.
Snowy dandruff on his shoulders
even though his hair was gone.
The right to war was one he earned.
His daughters said the nurses there
were especially polite
and some of them were literate.
The question was:
“How much did they know
of topics such as bulldozed hearts,
spirits losing wicked will
to wile and file a heap
of bitter closing hours.”
Engines came like rolling pins
across a pie crust on a board.
He still had tongues that tasted fruit
but arms could not reach apple trees.
Baby cheeks of wild pink roses
growing in a wood pile’s dregs.
A lily stalk, collapsed and dry,
as cattails in a winter ditch.
A flag upon a mail box, use-less hollow
metal now for dulcet good,
since eyes were spent pennies
in a crushed bank of intruding fog.
by Janet I. Buck
