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CHARRED WEDDING RICE
It was the force of the way things were.
A child born outside privy states
of matrimony's camisole.
Excuses sprayed around the room
like squirted Glade when
someone slips and smokes a joint.
His mother only seventeen.
Adoption was a Draino answer
meant for unintended clogs.
Still connected and consumed
by crazy graduation nights,
they married same as pressure sores
remove the rub that brings them pain.
In the long arch of arrowed time,
braided secrets grew their wings.
More straw was added to the nest.
Crushed emotion--lesson mulch
without the birds that set us free.
It's no one's fault kept
tapping on the closing doors.
Divorce was cutting dead bolts off.
In tragic wakes, a child was given other lives.
He still belonged to single wombs
and dreams of black charred wedding rice.
Guilt in moving sidewalks stayed.
Some slow hour past middle-age,
regret's retort grew abscess fire.
A woman searches for her son.
Finds him after thirty years.
Even tears seem bubbles at a carnival
that ends of summer have to pop.
Cotton candy on their thumbs
of courting hope and finding
someone home at last.
Welts of wired sobs and seams
burn ulcers in your uterus.
Patch them up with talking now.
Love is a retreating flame
if wind is not attended to.
-Janet I. Buck