Janet I Buck

BOXES WITH LIDS

I dance around a totem pole without much paint. Pass your photo in the hall, wish I knew wet kisses and old nursery rhymes you added to our silences. Your life is my unopened box growing heavy over time. Up, up, up in attic fires, in grieving flames. We cannot touch the surly heat. I can't back up the car of death, run it down a different road. I'd settle for imagined storms. Walk upon whatever noise the wind would hand me as it whips through naked treelines balancing against the season's brittle chill. I'd settle for a mohair sweater eaten by a batting moth; I'd settle for a shoelace string. Muscles of a question mark are nothing but a muddy shovel hammering at set concrete. Every poem is blank in bold -- ketchup bottles upside down with nothing running down the neck. I'll always be that Labrador, haggardly and lined with lice, refusing to release the branch. Janet Buck is a six-time Pushcart Nominee and the author of four collections of poetry. Her work has recently appeared in Three Candles, Red River Review, Pierian Springs, Facets, Stirring, Literary Potpourri, The Paumanok Review, PoetryBay, Poetry Magazine.com, The American Muse, and hundreds of journals world-wide. In 2002-2003 Buck's poetry and essays are scheduled to appear in Zuzu's Petals Quarterly, Mississippi Review, Artemis, Offcourse, The Montserrat Review, Recursive Angel, The Pedestal Magazine, Coelacanth, Cordite, CrossConnect, and The Oklahoma Review.

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