Twiddling your thumbs doesn’t get you high.

Wisdom of Butterflies by Jean Janicke

a small girl’s shadow...

I perceived the irony of the not-so-subtle message that went out in that gift-giving gesture from the family matriarch

Surely as poets write…

No one can tell another
how to live–so be wary
of anybody selling that particular
brand of promise. There is no way
you'll get your money's worth.

Molasses. Slow as. Trickles out the bolted spots, rivets thick with sticky sweet, thin steel buckling. 

Still, it stands. 

I watch you disappear, slight figure severe in concert black, sucked into that black immensity,

I feel without direction or certainty. Raw and vulnerable. Out of sorts. In a fog. Mournful. Call it what you will.  

You’re four years old visiting your dad at the castle that grownups call the social services building. A nice lady named Mrs. Chen usually plays with your dad and you, but she gets up and leaves the room.

I fly amongst swarms of
black and yellow lines between
bent-necked trees and church parking lots  

I preferred avoiding crowds from the early days of my life.  

To an apple in an orchard blue,
The sky’s a copper green,
Cloistered crimson honeycombs,
You’re recherché in elk-en tree.

Indulgence

My mother grunts like a greedy infant at the breast as the hospice health aide massages lotion into her flaky feet, her pleasure so audible it drowns out The Eternal Word Television Network she insists on playing 24/7 until the lesions on her brain claim her.

I know there are hidden spaces in my mother’s closet I can’t reach.

I walk where Karina’s path began, certain
that her vision became clear as her name
framed in concrete, like a Hollywood star.   

To live and die in Lynchburg,
Mad Jack sang his song as he
waved a bloody shirt.

A little girl, a grandchild, was crying. Lois liked the tribute. She wished more of the adults who went up to the casket were teary.

I’d heard about packs of dogs that run through the valley every few years, but I’ve never seen them. I figured it was just an old story.

El Rio

Had it not been for her long black hair you could not have said if she were a boy or a girl standing there, knee deep, feet wide apart in the Rio Hule. She was naked, except for her once lime green shorts, which were now faded to pistachio.

CANOEING ON SWAN RIVER

Here, movement is a breath this side of calm.
The canoe requires nothing of us
but to lull it into current,
a lazy ripple distant from the pine-drenched bank.