Sultry

On the weekend, you were a steady rain.
Yesterday when you were mostly cloudy
it was hard to read your sky.
But today you’re bright sunshine and warm
with a light southerly breeze.
Everything blooms around you
and fragrances follow your path.

I want to meet you on the veranda
as lemonade glasses sweat the afternoon.
Let’s generate a strong Bermuda high.
Tonight, let’s make some thunder
in the bedroom, and glisten afterward,
twisted in dampened sheets.

It’s not your heat, baby,
it’s your humidity.


* Best of the Issue - October 2008 winner! *

Old Man at Bedtime

At ten-thirty he sits at the edge of his bed
and swallows the last pills of the day,
then draws water from a straw
stuck in his favorite cup.
He places it on the night table,
then pulls two tissues from a box,
folding them in neat triangles
and tucking them into his pajama
shirt pocket (always blue plaid).
He removes his glasses, folds them,
and places them next to the cup.
His rosary beads lie on the bed
like a cross in a pile of beans,
but he has placed them exactly
two inches below the left corner
of his pillow, as he does every night.

You have to have a ritual
when you get old, he explains.
Otherwise you lose your place,
become confused, unmoored,
adrift in the mystery of your own house.

He turns off the light, reclines
on his right side, clutching the beads,
and begins with a prayer
modified from childhood
and covering all possibilities:
that he will wake again tomorrow
and begin his well-mapped routine
or not.



The Wound

In hindsight, everything told us
how the story might end,
had we only read you differently –

the yoke of your shoulders,
the echo of your walk,
how you carried your scowl
from station to station.

And on the weekend,
when you decided to climb out of
this life, we were still
not privy to reasons.

We can only hope that,
like the wound that seeks the knife,
you embraced the solution,
and it was a perfect fit.


Bruce W. Niedt is a "beneficent bureaucrat" from southern NJ whose work has appeared in numerous journals, including Writers' Journal, ByLine, The Fairfield Review, Mad Poets Review, Journal of New Jersey Poets, US 1 Worksheets, miller's pond, and The Wolf (UK). He won first prize for poetry at the 2006 and 2007 Philadelphia Writers Conference, and he has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His latest chapbook is Wire to the Heart (Maverick Duck Press).