Three Poems by Linda Myers
PLAYING HENRY FONDA ON A HUMID AFTERNOON, TATTOO JUNGLE, & SANCTUARY FOR OLD WOMEN
PLAYING HENRY FONDA ON A HUMID AFTERNOON I haven’t hunkered at a table shoulder to shoulder with strangers since Covid established territorial norm as six feet. Yet we huddle now in a room so close we feel each other’s body heat, whiff what we had for lunch. This could be a séance, I suppose. A grief group gathered for comfort. Med students poking at naked parts of a body on a gurney. We are a jury deliberating. We have struggled with rational emotion until we are ionized. Exhausted. Guilty of the need to be done, to run from mulling a young man’s destiny. As we the jury inch toward mistrial, the room cools taut with terribly polite anger. Stewed coffee smells bitter as the mood. Jury members lean back, hands now clasped behind heads. Open minds solidify to pigheaded. I never want to walk this graveled path again stopping now beside the road as others march on to some destination clear as day to them, not even on my route. TATTOO JUNGLE She is a cutter. Soft skin gives in. Utility knife, scalpel, razor leaves a thin bloody slice. She’s happy about that, at least she doesn’t burn her thighs with cigarette butts or Drano, burns so much harder to heal, harder to conceal from a judgmental world. The pain is the same. It’s what she must do to cope, to feel. She hides from mother’s lover’s stranger’s wondering wandering eyes. Self-inflicted scars cross nearly everybody’s lines. She disappears in a tattoo jungle. Vines entwine her ankles, ferns unfurl across her breasts, blossoms nestle between her thighs. Only I the artist know within her jungle, wounds thrive. I choose tips, load my gun. Another orchid, we decide. I am immersed in creation of this walking work of art. Secret cuts stay secret. With my complicity, she stays alive.
SANCTUARY FOR OLD WOMEN Consider my starting point: Body beached wreckage, knee bent as driftwood. Mind blurry about little things like time. Age wages its own kind of war but ye gods! I still ignite like a bonfire searing the Phoenix that doesn’t lift its feet fast enough. I fume at women voting for a man who grabbed them by the offending word. At caging brown babies. At justices who are not. I shake my arthritic fist until even I am tired of me. So here I sit shunted to the side of the road. The world I knew is gone. A helluva thing. I struggle up, trudge on, a refugee dropping mama’s scrapbook heirloom cups boudoir chair treasure by treasure left at the curb on the way to someplace new and in the oddest place, I find it. Sanctuary for old women. Load bearing walls for each other. We listen, take strength from others overcoming damage as we overcome our own. We pluck out time-worn troubles like tick heads yanked with tweezers and light each other’s campfires, tend the flames until we rise not spreading our wings as wide as the great bird I thought might be dead: but that thing with feathers hasn’t flown from us yet.
About the Poet:
Linda B. Myers traded snow boots for rain boots and moved from a marketing career in Chicago to Washington's Olympic Peninsula where she is now part of the old growth. She has Indy published ten novels, is newish to poetry, writes a monthly op/ed piece for the Sequim Gazette, and is a co-founder of Olympic Peninsula Authors, a group devoted to promoting the many fine authors out here in the wild. Her poetry has appeared in Cirque Literary Journal of the Pacific North Rim, Poetry Breakfast, publisher Empty Bowl's Madrona Series, and several other anthologies.
WOW
I really love all of these Linda
keep writing!
Really enjoyed these. Thank you!!!!