by Cherryl E. Garner

A woman whose entire intention was to find a graceful way
to corner chaos in her brain like pressing charcoal hard in hand
to one so perfect diamond spot, or failing that extracting it
from it, seemed just the perfect background noise as I cleaned out
the closet of our premier family nut by me just middling, just
the protégée.

We are so much like Goodwill in collecting flotsam, jetsam.
We define junk keepers.  We keep everything like rubber band
ball stretchers just until unseemly lightning strikes, electric shock
or drug-remitted eerie carnival (or sometimes, we just die)
reminds us that at some point it will all end up on streetsides
ready for the dumpster, stuff, some people, equally, the scientific,

real resolve for all that’s lost.  I was surprised by how I thought
I could have been her fierce companion, more than just a little
like poor Alice through the Looking Glass.  That Sylvia perched
on the mushroom.  Listening, I was so sure that we could share
the trim, crisp beds of institutions, childlike friends, with windows
of the world viewed through the webs of fingers fronting faces.

I, however, never made the grade for those who got the “treatment,”
skull caps wired up like toasters.  Rearrange it was the thinking then,
a kinder, gentler cure, the other option full-pressed jiggle, or some surgery
of problematic frontal lobe.  My mother was the winner of that prize,
and, jealously, I knew that I could better talk companiably
about the telescoping lights, the raisining of days, the gray

of all the colors.  Mother’s managed not to part yet.  Her dear forgone,
now they visit her, cross-legged, amiable and conversational.
Where’s our Sylvia without obsessive baking.  Is she lost
without a pen?  Was she named in some old high school yearbook,
“The Most Likely to Find Her Own Sorry Answers? or “Her Shoreline?”

CHERRYL E. GARNER manages a small law office in South Carolina, but has her deepest roots in Alabama, the inspiration for much of her poetry. Her poetic interest is in exploring family, landscape, the common and the divine in any forms that seem best to fit. To date, she has been noted for three poems in IBPC, and has been published in The Rose & Thorn, The Petigru Review, damselfly press, Artistry of Life, Riffing on Strings, Tipton Poetry Journal and Hanging Moss Journal.