George M Perreault
waking
when the buried dream fades
your body dreads to leave
a world fingered delicate as
deer stepping a dappled glade
but facts loom like police
patient yet insistent now
the pain in your knee nothing
to your sister’s adenocarcinoma.
daylight: radiation is useless.
the only blessing of a funeral is
those nieces you have always loved
from leagues and leagues away.
purple apple newspaper
i’ve aged along with my doctor until now
she’ll assign me words for the exit exam, but
i’ve none of those wastings whose names are
whispered into letters or names like Gehrig, and
with little to cover – my life’s a flat lake where
any hooked trout lowers it one eureka at a time –
she asks about Belfast, its old cobblestone burble,
the iron clankings between orange and green,
their dysfunctional government so like ours, and i
confirm the ongoing bitterness, structured poverties
and murals for the dead, the tour guides outside
the jail almost boasting of its wing for republican
terrorists, another for loyalist thugs, the calm in-
between for our decent ordinary criminals, so
i ask about the neuropathy in her own foot, if
the chemical shrapnel still shrieks in the night,
this old give-and-take between friends, until i
wonder if she wants those words: apple, purple,
and something about the news, sorry to see her
embarrassed how it had slipped from her mind,
nodding yes, newspapers, as if anything there was
worth knowing, lifting a hand and letting it fall.
George Perreault has worked as visiting writer throughout the Western United States, and his work has appeared in journals and anthologies in the US, Canada, Ireland, England, and India. His most recent book, Bodark County, is a collection of poems in the voices of characters living on the Llano Estacado in West Texas.