Janet Buck

Fake Nails

It must be tough to play a girl
with your penis sticking out.
I started with open--
knew how you struggled
with who you were.
Invited you into our home,
wanting to shoulder your ghosts.
You met my man: the smiles dissolved.
Envy’s cousin is Shakespeare’s witch.
Your crabapple countenance
was a crapshoot.
I never knew just how
the dice would roll
when I opened my mouth
to stroke you with "care."

"He" to "She"--imposturing
that blushed us all.
We would have stuck it out,
you know, despite the fraud,
if once you showed warm,
but even the beads of your sweat
were cold, stark hate.
You spiked our smiles like cannons
lest they interrupt your velvet darkness.
Make-up for dress-up--
an excusable mess--
if only you had lived for something
other than gutting the "us".
You drove fake nails
in bright, bright red;
our welcoming mat
smothered in mud.
Foundation caked the doorknobs
and I prayed for your plane
to just leave.
Marbled ashen discontent
was pouring from the urn of love.

Janet Buck teaches writing and literature at the college level. Her poetry, humor, and essays have appeared in The Pittsburgh Quarterly, The Melic Review, Sapphire Magazine, Recursive Angel, Southern Ocean Review, Lynx: Poetry from Bath, Apples & Oranges, Oranges & Apples, The Rose & Thorn, Mind Fire, The Astrophysicist’s Tango Partner Speaks, Perihelion, Oracle, Poetry Motel, Feminista!, Calliope, The Beaded Strand, 2River View, Kimera, The Free Cuisenart, In Motion, Athens City Times, Conspire, Idling, remark, BeeHive, Gravity, A Writer’s Choice, Niederngasse, Shades of December, Maelstrom, and hundreds of print journals and e-zines world-wide. "On the page," she says, "is where a letter drops to its knees. Catharsis, consciousness, and insight are braided threads of a trinity, a broomstick which encourages others to swat convoluted cobwebs in attics of their own lives. Writing is a private scream with a universal echo that emerges from humble accordions of inner-need."