A Lump In Her Throat

I’ve spun the cham­ber
and the damn gun clicked.
So what then,
I live another day,
make plans, drink cof­fee,
think about the garden
and tomor­row night
I’ll spin the thing again.
I’ve called the police,
the hos­pital, the fire
depart­ment. There’s not much
they can do. I’ve called
the tele­phone com­pany,
spent hours tangled
in their recor­ded maze,
finally I’m in con­ver­sa­tion
with David. “Do you
have the power cord
plugged into the wall?“
It’s not the wires,
its the incen­di­ary agent
and with no appar­ent clock
how can I pos­sibly
write, sleep, love
the people I love?
A white room, a formica
table, and a Taurus Mil­len­nium
series PT145 — it’s all
avail­able on Wiki­pe­dia.
A study in futur­o­logy.
This isn’t a good time
for God to go missing.

———-

Blind­ness

Every night she sits
at the com­puter
and goes blind. She types,
her fin­gers slid­ing across the keys,
some­times she speaks the sounds.
She res­ists the urge to feel her way
to the kit­chen or the wash­room.
She fears los­ing the words.
Not the smell of river, in spring
full with blos­som and long grass,
not the deep eyes of dog,
not the green, the hon­ey­suckle,
but the poem. If it falls
from the desk, rolls out­ward
across the rugs, through the slider,
she’ll never find it
in all that grass. To be safe
she ties string from the mon­itor
to the door, marks each foot
with a col­oured clip. Most nights
the poem gets away
regard­less and after hours
of crawl­ing around on her belly
feel­ing every blade of grass,
her sight returns. She takes out
the garbage, rolls the barbe­que
under cover, draws a blanket up
over her daughter’s shoulder.
When she passes the com­puter
on her way to bed, its screen is dark.

———-

When The Poet Complained

“OK then,
write me a play.“
she said
and the suf­fer­ing man
sud­denly found him­self
at a table with paper
and a rolling Bick
Sure
and the table
was up against the win­dow
of a pent­house
where he could look down on the streams
of people enter­ing and exit­ing
the build­ings below, the buses, he could see
the backs of gulls as they patrolled
for garbage.
“I can’t taste any­thing
any­more.” He whispered to the old books
and held them
against his face.

• First pub­lished in Dunes Review, Vol 13, Issue 1. Sum­mer 2008.

Jude Good­win is a poet liv­ing in the coastal rain­forests of Brit­ish Columbia, Canada, where she freel­ances as publisher/editor/author and illus­trator for a vari­ety of small journ­als and papers. Her poems can be read in vari­ous journ­als includ­ing Cider Press Review, Burn­side Review, Com­stock Review, and have done well in the IBPC: New Poetry Voices com­pet­i­tion. Her web­site is judegoodwin.com.