Brussels Sprouts
 

The pool was warm;
we were seaweed
slung and drifting silently.
The locker room was a cold blast
reviving aches, reverberating
moans and groans
and other mortal assonance.
Nipples taut against the wind,
Brussels sprouts on cracking plates,
youth just passed at hurry's gait.
Rose of easy gone for good.

We talked about the trivial
of temperatures and icy roads.
Breaking hips like toothpicks
on an olive ring we tried to skewer,
but hit the seed.
"Yesterday," one woman said,
"thorns and bristles lined the street;
I swore at them, their littering;
today, in frost, they looked like lace."
Taken back and whittled down,
I sensed the way her struggles
brought her fish to fry.

Nature plays with leveling,
always finding Middle C
on dusty old piano slats.
Orange sunsets hanging out
in boxes of stashed ornaments,
beating up the black of dark.
Mercury of rising stars
in glassy-eyed thermometers.
Standing now would always be
that quick green kiss
beneath the drying mistletoe.
Our bones, shot tigers, all of them,
had things to say about the world.

by Janet I. Buck

First Published in The Pittsburgh Quarterly
 

Hooks & Nets
 

The theatre is black.
White walking canes
are shining with their estrogen.
Limping through
their chances trimmed
by effort's cloying litany.
Hairpin turns and haiku harps,
bodies at their feeble hour
embracing blessings all the same.
Figurines at bright cotillions
waiting for the dance to start.
Cripple's ripple brings an ocean
to its flex. ÝGrains unite,
a castle stands; art attacks,
coagulates the disparate,
whispers to a winter gale.
Wheelchairs bump and grind
and clash so joyously you'd
think some god had intervened.

Ten feet under tragedies --
yet we find a miracle
like fish absorb their oxygen.
Bonded by the hooks and nets
that steal our grace and peel our flesh.
Decay can teach the wholer parts
to scream of their circumference.
We should be quoting Hell and aren't. Ý
In every moment's bubble wrap,
an obelisk is fanning rainbows in the sky,
turning clouds to macaroons
the sun will burn and we will chew.
Mooning truth ain't glamorous
and some will stare,
absorb the courage in abyss,
grab a chain to pinch a link
in bracelets falling from their wrists.

    by Janet I. Buck

***In Honor of KickstART 2001

***First Published in Sand to Glass