We sit side by side in a private but privy
wheat field stripped of its grain.
The gold mane is there in a dream,
matted by tears; intrinsic to their canopies,
our hands are just the seizing kind.
Drinking coffee, fiddling with cigarettes
like pencils standing for our flaws.
Child-less for what it's worth, our reasons
different, dwelling in the ache despite.
Pregnancy at seventeen
was baby booties in a ditch.
Your father fired rifles off to scare your horse,
hoping you would hit the ground,
bleed away that scarlet shame.

Adoption was adultery.
And you were cheating on your heart
in ways the years are driving in.
I see it in the canvas of your wrinkled face.
Shape that's losing puff and blush
like mounds of fading whipping cream.
I wish myself a window washer, wiper blades,
and cotton cloths of folded grief.
To meet your son is not enough.
Genesis of spring is slow.

You need his breath of tiny purple lilacs beads
to choke these weeds with fragrances.
I think about the Daphne plant you handed me,
elixirs of the scent of hope
when times were tough and I was raw.
These ghosts we live: mine a missing uterus;
yours abandoned, languishing
because your father couldn't choose
between a life and gunny sacks of withered guilt,
that bitter tonic pride can be
in bringing sunsets to their knees.

Janet I. Buck is a two-time Pushcart Nominee and a recent winner of The Kota Press Anthology Contest. She is the author of four collections of poetry: Calamity's Quilt, Reefs We Live, Bookmarks in a Hurricane, and Before the Rose. Buck's poetry and poetics have appeared in The Paumanok Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Born Magazine, CrossConnect, Southern Ocean Review, OffCourse, Salon d'Aarte, Stirring Magazine, Moondance, and hundreds of journals world-wide. Her hobbies include needlepoint, lap swimming, piano, cycling, and gardening. For links to more of Janet's work, go to: http://members.aol.com/jbuck22874/whatsnew.html

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