The Tennessee Twister
by Janet I. Buck
"Yesterday, we had a nice brick house and four vehicles.
Today, we don't own a toothbrush."
Susan Henry
Mossy Grove, Tennessee
The gray funnel begins in white --
grows dark with gathering dust.
It grabs a car then sets it down
like pocket change.
Southern breezes turn to rage.
A trailer wraps its metal walls
around a pole, crushing every sign of life.
Something simple as the wind
carries Armageddon gloom.
A child scowers mounds of wreckage
looking for the legs of dolls.
Dresses hang from bending branches --
empty costumes of the dead.
Every stanza that I pull,
a thinning string of dental floss.
Tomorrow's sunrise isn't dawn --
just burning lamps for
fourteen months of body counts
outsmarting calculus and strength.
Bracelets of the evening stars
lost between the cracks of fate.
Piers reduced to splintered reeds
without a song -- while oceans boil
and millions utter words of why.
Cartwheels of the tumbleweeds
dine on crumbs of waning prayer.
I'd whisper hope in the conch
of a stranger's ear, but flesh is gone,
van Gogh style, the gutted artist
languishing as moss weeps over the rock.
Janet Buck's poetry, poetics, and fiction have appeared in The Pedestal
Magazine, Poetry Magazine.com, CrossConnect, The Pittsburgh Quarterly,
Kimera, The Rose & Thorn, 2River View, Southern Ocean Review, Disquieting
Muses, Urban Spaghetti, Perihelion, Mind Fire, Born Magazine, pif, 3rd Muse,
Verse Libre Quarterly, Big Bridge, pith and hundreds of journals world-wide.
Buck was one of U.S. poets to be featured at the "One Heart, One World"
Exhibit at the United Nations Exhibit Hall in New York City in April, 2000.
In January 2001, Art Villa Records released Janet's first audio CD of poetry
and music called Before the Rose. It is available at:
http://www.artvilla.com/shopping/poetry/rose.htm
To hear a sample from the CD, go to:
http://www.artvilla.com/mp3/umbrellas.mp3.
Note: Featured
author in January 2001
E-mail: JBuck22874@aol.com
Writing interests: Poetry
Poems: "The
Orphan", "Caught
in Lesser Tragedies", "The
Broken Promise", "The
Gargoyle", "The
Going", "The
Bag Lady", "Rushing
Toward Entelechy", "The
Paralyzed Apocalypse", "Frozen
Sonnets", "New
York, New York", "Live
on CNN", "America
Under Siege", "Gutter
Balls"
Links: Hot Links:
Janet I. Buck, Janet's
Latest Interview, Desideratum's
Doggie Dish, Author's Den,
Active Amp.org—Features
Janet I. Buck, Poetry
Magazine.Com-October-Janet Buck, The
Part-time Postmodernist (August 2000), San
Francisco Salvo, Moongate:
Janet I. Buck, Offcourse, The October
Country , Cafe
Society: Poetry Life & Times, Kookamonga
Square, The
Adirondack Review , janetbuck.com, Funky Dog
Publishing—Janet Buck's Strawberry Nipples, Athens
Avenue—Janet I. Buck, One
World-One Heart Exhibit , Ygdrasil:
Issue 9 September 2000