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Poetry
by
Janice Krasselt Medin
Meeting
of Minds
There
are no secrets here in this room
as I drift, wine in
hand,
from one cluster of women to another.
I long to dive
into luxurious caves
and feel soft arms around me. Who
could
not understand that need?
Like
most here, I had a mother who wanted
another kind of
daughter—one who
had crushes on boys, giggling
over
names like Josh or John, not Rachel
or Sarah. She
remained mystified
as I stayed a tomboy, the boys
around me
best friends with whom
to shoot pool or rifles, or talk about
sports.
But I married, later left that nest
and finally
admitted to myself my love
of women. Others here accept
the
wallet in my back pocket, my swagger.
Old facades fade, and I
have discovered
a love of nurturing the familiar:
the full
breasts, soft lips, curves.
How amazing it is to make love to
a body
made like mine, to taste the female of myself.
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Do
Not Resuscitate
The
monitor showed 3rd degree block--
a heart rhythm where the
atria, the top part
of the heart, beats separately
from the
ventricles, the bottom,
like random thoughts,
one thought
connecting to another,
the next two or three
escaping the
common thread.
The patient was 60 years old,
not a young
60
with kidney and liver disease,
a pacemaker buried
inside her chest
like a sunken vessel at sea. Its
engine
refused to spark a beat of the ventricle.
We knew
she was dying,
her blood pressure like air in a tire
leaking
lower and lower, and lungs filling
with fluid. When her heart
slowed
to 40 beats a minute, her eyes grew wide.
We
couldn’t believe her brain received
enough blood to feed
her words
“Is
this the time to pray?”
We
answered in unison, “Yes.”
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Waking
I
marvel how during sleep
we tangle together like a tight
braid,
a lovers’ knot they call it. Even
when we
turn, we always hold on
to each other so we are one.
When
we wake at 3 am and talk
as if the night belonged solely to
us,
we try to forget in four hours,
we will be swept away
from each other.
Your hands touch my breasts, my thighs,
and
every time I touch you in return,
the wonder of our first time
blossoms
once again, a light both of us
had never seen
before. As we
celebrate that first night, we know
the
memories of our touches
will return us to the shelter we have
made.
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