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[with poems by Janis Harrington]
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Suicidal Ideation
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Think of dark starlings, each a ringleader,
invading your hanging backyard feeder.
Magnets for their kind, they muster, rout
more timid species from seed and suit.
Fast and fertile breeders, they multiply,
a flock of hundred swells to thousands.
Screeching and squawking rapacious hoodlums,
they give no quarter and sing no harmony,
waging war with incessant cacophony.
No calm, no détente; nonstop attack.
In waves, like bombers, they dive and peck.
Wing to wing, they block sun, moon, stars, finally
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blot out all light, transforming noon to midnight.
No escape. a full eclipse of hope.
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Janis Harrington
from How to Cut a Woman in Half, Able Muse Press, San Jose CA; © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Life is a dream. / You are the projector. You are the screen.
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Dad is sitting at the new table beside the front window. The sun has settled; the ocean is pink and purple, at rest. Someone has helped Dad transfer into an upholstered chair and pushed his wheelchair into a corner. He is talking with his youngest grandchild while they work a puzzle. Everyone has arrived. Everyone surrounds him.
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This is the image I create and cultivate after hanging up the phone. Bob has called to assure me that their eight-hour drive to the coast presented only surmountable obstacles. Now they’ll spend a week at the beach house celebrating Dad’s 99th birthday. Dad has been longing to be there for a year. He started asking me how soon he could go even before Mom’s memorial service last September.
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Last night Linda and I argued about a related family wrangle. She was angry at the person sharpening their claws. I told her it was bedtime and I was determined to put conflict out of my mind for eight hours. Let dreams sort it. Of course, I then woke at 3:00 and ruminated for an hour or two. Isn’t this supposed to be the week of no worries, Dad safe in the arms of my brother and his family? After a year of all manner of arrangements, finagles, and complications, after each nurse’s phone call and the anticipation of the next one, aren’t I allowed to flip the ON switch for peace?
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What the hell does that even mean, I am the screen and the projector? That I alone make my life what it is? Or that I imagine I do? In dreams the tangle of images and juxtapositions is supposedly the effort by my unconscious to shuffle into some semblance of meaning all my disparate and disconnected moments. Perhaps Dad won’t scuffle out of an unfamiliar bed after midnight and break his hip. Perhaps the worst is not always just about to happen. Scientists have discovered through meticulous testing and observation that there are indeed other species besides Homo sapiens that can imagine and anticipate the future. God help them.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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How to Cut a Woman in Half
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Fate, a cruel magician, vanishes her husband,
leaving her table with half as many plates,
shower rack missing half its towels,
bed half empty. The trick: after the blade falls,
she shrinks herself into half of her former life.
But is he truly absent? She wills
each day’s crawling hours to end, certain
he waits in sleep’s tempting garden –
there’s no hope of persuading her
that dreams are merely pan’s sleight of hand.
Eventually, she will emerge on stage,
appearing unharmed, performance complete.
Does it matter what is real or illusion if,
when she steps from grief’s box, she feels whole?
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Janis Harrington
from How to Cut a Woman in Half, Able Muse Press, San Jose CA; © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Solo
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The Buddhist acupuncturist, gazing beyond
the veil, report that Nick at last, has shed
earth’s weight. His soul, presently in the astral state,
has embraced its destiny – like the wayward
gray whale, whose biological mandate
to migrate finally required
his recent swim from bay to open ocean.
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Annie’s turn, now, to exit sorrow’s cul-de-sac,
navigate rocky channels to new seas,
resisting the sirens’ call of what used to be,
accepting she and Nick must make solo passages:
his voyage, to collective consciousness,
without form or visible home;
hers, to find a port in life’s physical realm.
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Janis Harrington
from How to Cut a Woman in Half, Able Muse Press, San Jose CA; © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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This sonnet sequence by Janis Harrington is mournful, painful, piercing. It reveals every face of suffering but also every facet needed for healing. How to cut a woman in half? Divide her from the person she loves most dearly. Dissect away with blunt shears half of her being, her essence. How to put her back together? That is a long and painful process and no certain sunrise on the horizon, although a sister is required and is present. I treasure the metaphor nearing the book’s final pages: Together, we flew close to grief’s center, / our wings sturdier than wax and feather.
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How to Cut a Woman in Half was finalist for the 2020 Able Muse Book Award and is available HERE. Janis Harrington’s first book, Waiting for the Hurricane (St. Andrews University Press © 2017) won the Lena M. Shull Book Award of the North Carolina Poetry Society. Discover more about Janis HERE.
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❦ ❦ ❦
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Acroyoga
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Flex your trust muscle, the instructor advises,
making us giggle. Annie and I alternate
as flyer or base, each of us able
to bear a sister’s weight. Now, my back on the mat,
our hands clasped, my feet supporting her thighs,
I straighten my legs to ninety degrees –
my turn to hold her aloft. Acrobat of strength
and grace, she soars, escaping sorrow’s labyrinth.
Her liberty has freed me. Being her spotter,
daily witness to her reckoning with loss,
released my heart’s stubborn resistance
to Pete’s fate, long mourning of his absence.
Together, we flew close to grief’s center,
our wings sturdier than wax and feather.
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Janis Harrington
from How to Cut a Woman in Half, Able Muse Press, San Jose CA; © 2022
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❦ ❦ ❦
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V E R S E and I M A G E 
“How to put her back together?” In this case, with the loving, patient devotion of her sister, the poet.
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Very true, who herself is made whole in the process. Thanks, Joan — this book has given me moments of healing as well. —B
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Thank you for sharing Jan’s amazing poems, full of dark and precise imagery, and your reflections on them. So many of us yearn for harmony and goodness and we keep bumping up against Life, with its strifes and griefs we cannot change. We stumble on. It’s so good though to share them with others.
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Thanks truly for that, Debra. Yes, ‘bumping up against life’, just unavoidable. We stumble on together if we’re fortunate to have someone to stumble along with. —B
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With me and my wife in our mid 80s, I try to avoid thinking of the divide that is sure to come. After 63 years together, I can’t even imagine making myself whole. Maybe we will be like my grandparents who went within one week of each other. But we celebrate these few last years, trying to soak up these gifts we have been given. Janis hit beautiful gut-punch with this collection.
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Thanks, Les, Janis’s poetry is sharp and painful and as beautiful as life. This is a healing collection, for reader as well as for writer.
Last week I was standing next to a twenty-something during our chorus performance and a made extra space for me as we warmed up. “Because you’re the oldest one here.” “Yeah,” I said, “the closest to death.” He didn’t have much reply to that. —B
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good reply!
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This comment is from Janis . . .
Thank you for featuring my poems, and for your thoughtful comments. I am honored that the sonnets touched you. Shaping the events into poems, getting caught up in the work of revising and revising, was a healing process. The Black Socks, my poetry critique group, were wonderful in holding the sorrow of these poems meeting after meeting, and making excellent suggestions.
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