Caught in a downpour
of years, I ache under ancient hip of sky,
everything in disrepair, despair swarming
like blackflies as if spring squalled in February,
as if I am lost in a ground fog of blame.
How can anything be the same when
you are dying? Lay the spoons on the table.
Put the apricots in a bowl. Expect high tide
to overwhelm the breakwater, to flash
against pilings, drive boats onto land.
I’ve left behind the atmospheric river of youth
with iridescent-edged clouds. Now I hug
the beaufort scale, hope for breezy instead
of catastrophic. I wrap myself in layers
of cotton and wool, nubbed hope,
and tattered resolutions. Ground full of ice
and treachery. Every day, gray and dense
with collapsing pressure, veering winds.
It’s hard to know which way to face.
Women’s Work
It’s born in me, the fabric of spit and survival, how I need to shovel compassion, make a bucket of sympathy and carry it
across the parking lot of everyone’s grief. Learn to sweep
at a young age. Learn to hold my mouth at an angle, to purse it
as if I sip on a straw. The time I knelt before the toilet, a blizzard
of words blackening my head—mirror, dinner, knife, red. Sometimes
I think about my life as a chair without a back or legs, nowhere
to lounge. Time gives me children, smelling of sour milk and powder,
presses me up at 2 am, my mind stiff as a marble statue as I rock.
If I’m not careful, one son may turn into a turnip when I make stew.
My stomach roils, but I remember steam rising as my mother taught me
to iron, each slit stiff, not a trace of softness left. I sprayed
starch over each stretched garment. When the car stalls, my job
is to stand by the road, raise my skirt higher. At the copy machine
I never let a man’s inky gaze stain me. But in the closet, I sometimes
replace the mop, let some man wash me clean with his hands.
Waiting Room
On the wall a TV frames tropical homes, sand, rooms
with white walls. A way to mute missing. olive
chairs. My cell phone plugged in. The power at home
out, lines down. Here all the lines are straight, angles
always right. What can go wrong in such a world?
Are you listening? What can possibly turn out
rough or troubled. Voices from the TV just barely
visible. Each time the door opens, we look up.
Each time, someone calls a name, we all
look away politely. Sometimes you can hear one
side of a cell phone conversation. The black and white
time on the clock beside the TV whispers, but
what is there to hear in a hospital waiting room?
Good news is relative. I’m just waiting. Out the window,
a brick wall stretches in sun. Possibly warm.
Rooster
Maybe he had a name, a way to call him across the gravel
drive, free range and half-wild, but he came to us
unwanted, disheveled, any name long fallen into the wide
yawn of nature. A rooster is disorder, disturbance, shape-
shift of feathers that pulls you from dreams with his rough-
throated crow. We hated him. But we kept him. Until
people from the city came to visit in their shiny jeep with
the German shepherd dog that wouldn’t harm a flea, that
managed to slip out the half-open window, grab the
rooster, a deep bite into its back, not quite killing it. I never
blamed the dog. Any yellow feathers the rooster had now
black with blood. My husband wrung its neck, handed me
the body. My eyes watered from the smoke of the fire as I
dipped him in hot water, swished, and the cells holding the
quills released. I knelt, plunged him in cold water, let the
scent of the lilac bush wash over us, wrapped him in a
towel. The only decent thing to do was cook and eat him. I
stuffed him with a mix of onions, walnuts, raisins, spices,
baked him the way I would any chicken. Outside the
weather never changed, each day robed in sun. He tasted
fine. Not tough. When he changed form and only bones
remained, I spread the relics beneath the lilac bush,
crushed petals in my hand, let the trace of those blooms
follow him on his journey.
Judy Kaber is the author of three chapbooks.Her poems have appeared in journals such as Hunger Mountain, Poet Lore, and Spillway. Recently, her poem“Sword Swallowing Lessons,” was featured on “The Slowdown.” Judy won the 2021 and 2023 Maine Poetry Contest. She is a past poet laureate of Belfast, Maine (2021-2023).
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