"The police ask, 'Why didn't you leave?'"

______

Janet recommends these on line literary sites.

______

Contact
Ms. Bernichon

______

Janet Bernichon reads "Cancer Dreams"

Echolalia

The junkman's whippet,
another Nico thirty years back
and dead even then,
wraith in attitude amour,
replicated Chelsea Girl
loves this life wrapped
in the legend's high
and low notes moaned
with a single hollow
bubble of breath, heroin's

dirge. You worship
the skeletal shrine suicide.
Tattoos in progress,
love notes written on your back,
spell out the indelible need.
It rests in the marrow, slopes over
iliac crests fashionably poking
through white skin and dirty denim,
down pocked arms,
sleeves rolled up in hope
of a hit. You don't love anyone

enough to share the last piece
with. You love this life, its anticipation
of a needle pushed in a vein,
the dance with death in drag
to slow music. Nico appears

and reappears like a refrain
in the song screaming in your head. She nods
in your direction as you jones in a flop,
wrapped in a brown wool blanket
in the drowse of August. Snot
runs over your lips as you tell her

you love the life. You tell her
you love the life. You tell her
you love the life.






Cancer Dreams

I toss in my collective bed
of hungry dogs
straining at the end of tethers.

I walk over unmarked mounds
of a mass grave, sit under trees
with withered roots. I lay

under glass with Mother's
headless wings. Quicker
than the killing jar.






Needle Localization Biopsy

Prick my finger. Fear
flows onto a glass slide,
collects in the bottom of a tube.

The needle that pierces
the widowed breast points
to uncertainty. Like the hands

of a clock, circling breast tissue,
a surgeon fastens a fish hook.
The malignant millimeter

widens the lumen of the hour-
glass where time falls fast,
now faster.






Never Any Trouble

The white hot hatred of a knife
slashing flesh burns blindingly
like the back of his hand.

_____her fingers
_____on the edge
_____the kitchen floor

The police ask
"Why didn't you leave?"
She has the right to be silent.

_____please don't
_____a boning knife
_____blood red dead

Viewers of News At 11
see her yearbook photo.
She married her high school sweetheart.

_____nose smashed
_____please, don't
_____crushed blueberries

Neighbors say "Such a good
mother, so quiet, never any
trouble. Who knew?"

_____a shotgun blast of fists
_____blood red dead
_____the edge of fear

It didn't happen because he swore
he would never do it again,
but because she believed him.

_____I'm sorry
_____please don't
_____a way of life