in medias res

Most daring: I submitted five poems to a publisher. a couple to share here.

Pain reliever

I say: peppermint oil behind my ears
cool leaf unfolds a remedy for the
unspoken.
ginger root lulling my cramped unease.
Herbal, since new research cautions NSAIDs risk
damage to cardiac tissue,
and I with weak muscle in my chest already.

_____________________________________________

Spring Breaks

Spring (break) meant relief
of you.
You touted around Germany one year,
New York City the next, and I
uninvited.

We brimmed the car with snacks
the April that you sashayed France.
I chose the place (Mexico)
where we haggled for a blanket
that was mine.
I touched wooden carved lions
and tasted horchata
sweet on my tongue in
hot Juarez air.
El Paso too, the way in, out.

You loved Münster, you said.
and slew us with photographs
of cobblestoned markets,
flat in the picture. While

we'd gone to Georgia: I smelled
the air where you'd studied home
economics; an entire degree.
Athens in my lungs was damp
and musty like our basement;
where you both had first met, and kissed,
and the city you left.

Through Marietta, my grandmother's,
a house ringing with quiet, and fat
with butter and fried okra, boiled
peanuts, milk-mashed potatoes,
puremaple syrup, chicken, and pork
that threw me ten pounds off
your diet.
There were murmuring evenings that week:
three generations of Jones. We all looked
alike, and I most like her.
She hated her nose too, as we ours
and her middle name my first.
Stories of bowel movements, and worries
of "nursing homes" that seemed somewhere
for mothers with babies to me.

We swoll the car again, familiar Cheez-Its
and chewing gum. Two days
through the South not yet heat-heavy.
We stopped at a Waffle House once
at a Cracker Barrel, sharing pancakes.

We, always home before you, slept doors
and windows open, still family.