Janet Buck

That Nitro Pill We no longer drink. For a reason. It's a dull and tedious tale. Suffice to say, I hopped on the booze horse and never climbed off. Fell instead. A bottle of wine sits in the fridge, one glass gone from yesterday's brunch, which you drank and I poured. Its yellowness, corked and pretty like an old lover who was probably worse in bed than my wish recalls. Would it matter if I slipped? And sipped from the church where my bones grew up. I pop the top. Take a sniff. A piece of me floats in the dregs of its vinegar giddiness. I was secure beneath porous wood like the homeless find warmth, in short scraps of wind, near oil cans. For years, it was that nitro pill that held off raging heart attack. *********************************************************** November 9th Today, November 9th, I spend the afternoon stuck on an overpass behind a "Wide Load" truck, behind a stalled motor home, its shiny purple paint job, just washed, but the engine dead, I suppose. My radio tuned to NPR; lawyers argue hotly about the shape of ballots in a Florida county and political knickers are twisted like a corkscrew no one knows who owns the bottle for. The police arrive on the scene. Bright red lights of justice writ in black and white. Impatient lines behind my car growing chunks of centipedes. They tell me I can "squeeze" between the guardrail and the truck, an inch to spare on either side of my mirrors. So I sit, afraid of the risk as the horns blare and the ads play. Ten men pull out their cellular phones, little red ants on a bulky tree, the sugar of progress beneath wet hands. Rant of minutia fading in the winter fog. Eleven years ago today, the Berlin Wall fell. A protest in Germany wails across the ocean, lands in the nest of my lap; accent grates on unschooled ears. Neo-Nazis have struck again and killed, as deftly as an umbrella pole slits an autumn leaf. Crows speckle a nearby rooftop. Hopping about its grainy shingles like buttons popping off a blouse. Their common blackness gathering around a meal I cannot see. My arms seem short and I am small. Cuspid of a lazy angel chewing on a cushy dawn *********************************************************** The Orphan Mother, you are my dream scroll drifting in the tight neck of a bottle floating a sea frozen by death. Its vault a box I cannot open with a single pair of hands. My hair frizzed by sedatives of words latching on the figurative-- when I needed you to comb its beaches with unchipped shells of fingertips now buried beyond a memory's reach. Father is kind, so generous at wallet time, a Noah's Ark when storms of knives threaten motion's apple core. He sponsors conferences of strength, mugging rapists of my fate. I tap him, questioning the unsaid and the sacred, but the keg is dry. My arms are tired and muscles lean toward atrophy. The wait, a noose on creaking scaffolds of the years. The wish to know you-- tumor brewing underneath the stitches of a tragedy. I wonder what my stanzas mean. Hang them in a closet's darkness, hoping wrinkles shake out creases ironed in. My strange skin, this quilt of art, a tapestry that has no roots.

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