Category: Janice N. Harrington

by Janice N. Harrington

Dust, stillness, the stench of raw earth,

each year, this same solemnity—

lifting the trapdoor to take the rungs

down and down into a room of sand

in search of a box that held nothing.

Nothing? A cardboard box tied by twine,

storage for two skirts, a cotton blouse,

a tea-colored slip, a lady’s handkerchief

stitched with purple floss by hands

she had never touched, though she knew

the pockets their fingers had reached into,

and the hems they had raised and pushed aside.

Heirlooms washed and folded over a garden fence,

left for the sun to dry and the heat

to billow full again, as clothes will always

seek dimension. See—she was a short woman

and wide-hipped. She sewed. On Sundays

she wore a blue cotton blouse with velvet panels.

Her hems swished and smelled of red sand.

Nothing more. And the one who raised

the trapdoor and lifted the box asks, asks,

and asks, but they know nothing more.

Slip, skirts, blouse, hanky, she brings

them in, smooths the folds into fresh creases,

mummies each piece into sheet or pillow sham,

and restores them in a cardboard box

to sand, to darkness and cool unmoving air.

Will anyone save the cloth-skin

that once held your shape?

Will anyone wash away its darkness?

from Even the Hollow My Body Made Is GoneFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2007
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Janice N. Harrington

Evening, and all my ghosts come back to me

like red banty hens to catalpa limbs

and chicken-wired hutches, clucking, clucking,

and falling, at last, into their head-under-wing sleep.

I think about the field of grass I lay in once,

between Omaha and Lincoln. It was summer, I think.

The air smelled green, and wands of windy green, a-sway,

a-sway, swayed over me. I lay on green sod

like a prairie snake letting the sun warm me.

What does a girl think about alone

in a field of grass, beneath a sky as bright

as an Easter dress, beneath a green wind?

Maybe I have not shaken the grass.

All is vanity.

Maybe I never rose from that green field.

All is vanity.

Maybe I did no more than swallow deep, deep breaths

and spill them out into story: all is vanity.

Maybe I listened to the wind sighing and shivered,

spinning, awhirl amidst the bluestem

and green lashes: O my beloved! O my beloved!

I lay in a field of grass once, and then went on.

Even the hollow my body made is gone.

from Even the Hollow My Body Made Is GoneFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2007
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.

by Janice N. Harrington

       This little piggy cried wee wee wee

        all the way home

We cared for her and watched the furious streaks,

the flesh gone yellow, gray-green, then black,

the darkness creeping from toe to toe, from toe to arch,

till through the ruptured skin we could see her graying

muscle. We could see her bones. But we turned

her every hour, as the nurses directed, turned her

gingerly so as not to lose the softened flesh.

We lifted the ruined foot, wrapped in a paper layer,

and eased it into a garbage bag to catch its leaking.

That the bag was airless, a plastic kiln for already

burning flesh, we did not consider, doing the best

we could, doing what the nurses told us, giving

her codeine with sips of water, watching

as her urine darkened. But it didn’t matter.

She slept mostly, moaning when we lifted her head

to press a cup against her lips, moaning as we turned

her. Each day, the nurse begged her family: Reconsider,

please reconsider. How many days? How many hours?

Enough for the foot to fall from the ankle, for the Achilles’

string to slacken, rotted through, for us to reel away,

dizzied by wretchedness, afraid that we would watch

the gangrenous blackening from ankle to calf.

But at last the nurse called enough times. The son’s

wife came. She went in and hurried out, saying Oh.

Oh, we didn’t know. And we hated them.

from The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing HomeFind it in the library

Copyright © BOA Editions, Ltd 2011
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, Inc.
on behalf of BOA Editions LTD.