Janet Buck - Poetry 03/00

Purple Cabbage

by Janet I. Buck

A patchwork quilt of purple cabbage
bleeding with clear difference--
a stale start from feeble segments
of a dream, my scraps of effort
roll your way, chasing what remains
of grace with vermin-quick vernacular.
Your eyes will have a choice to make--
to see and feel or close and not--
shutting down the ways I hurt.

Shades of noble artistry
are parasols that shirk hot sun.
It burns straight through and so do I.
Born of such ignoble cause,
suffer comes in many shades
but somehow always tastes the same.
It could be our connectedness
that makes the world spin
lighter in its shadowed frame.
Fathom is a riding crop.
I hope you never put it down.

I state my case the way
thick thunder sasses skies.
My wooden leg,
a jar of plastic bacon bits
from menus that I can't return.
Its cornea examines wounds--
an Alcatraz of suffer's tome.
Cover art is torn in places.
Still I am a book inside
that dabbles with its destiny.

Janet Buck teaches writing and literature at the college level. Her poetry and poetics have appeared in The Melic Review, The Pittsburgh Quarterly, Kimera, 2River View, Tintern Abbey, Southern Ocean Review, The Horsethief's Journal and hundreds of journals world-wide. In 1998 and 1999, she has received numerous creative writing awards and been a featured poet for Seeker Magazine, Poetry Today Online, Vortex, Conspire, Poetry Cafe, Dead Letters, the storyteller, Poetry Heaven, Athens City Times, Poetik License, 3:00 AM e-zine, Poetry Super Highway, and Carved in Sand. Last fall, Newton's Baby Press published her first print collection entitled Calamity's Quilt. Janet is one of ten artists to be featured at the "One Heart, One World" Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City in April, 2000. The tour will travel to four countries.