Breathless

Jeanne Bryner

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 1996
• eBook ISBN: 9781631010903
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

Jeanne Bryner is a registered nurse. Her poems and stories have appeared in several magazines and journals, including Annals of Internal Medicine, American Journal of Nursing, International Journal of Arts Medicine, The Sun, and in the anthology Intensive Care. She is the author of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Breathless (The Kent State University Press, 1995).

TASTE OF TIN

Doctor, I itch down there and it burns when I go pee.

I don’t know for how long,

but my granny says no girl of ten

should be swolled like that, stand around digging herself

all the time, even in Sunday school, pee the bed,

and cry every time the sun comes up.

My daddy’s a craneman on the docks, works graveyard.

Mama waits counter at Joe’s, works dayshift,

and my three brothers are fixing to go

to kindergarten, second, and fourth grade

this fall. My big sister, Kelly, moved to Memphis

with Aunt Grace, who has cancer in her belly.

Kelly wears bras and underpants

the color of orange sherbet

down at Isaly’s. Do you like sherbet?

Why you asking if anybody touches me?

You mean like hug me?

Like hold me on their lap? Like carry me piggyback?

Like read me some yellow-haired princess story

with colored pictures in a book?

No, there ain’t nobody do that with me.

Why you so red in the face when you talk to my mama

and say stuff growing in my privates that can’t be

growing on little girls? I can’t see nothing growing

down there, just raw is all.

Why my mama go and cry like that?

Don’t make my mama cry

or I—well now you did it, I peed myself—

warm pissy puddle under my behind

and I don’t have no clean drawers.

Doctor, my mama hugging me real tight, just now;

she rocks me, hush, shush against her soft titties

in the lace bra. She smells like Tuesday’s meatloaf special

and day-old gravy. She says, don’t worry

you peed your pants;

we go home now.

You straighten your snowy coat,

wipe your black rim glasses.

Here’s the cream, you tell her and, get these pills;

don’t leave her with anyone you don’t know.

My mama nods,

nods yes, yes. She always nods.

Now we walk down our brick alley and I read

Thelma gives Head

and Mrs. Wassum’s gray cat licks

the edge of a sardine can.

I taste the tin and the oil and mustard.

She looks up at me,

green marble eyes; she knows.

I feel my mama spread cool white stuff on my crotch;

the itch settles some. The sun’s going to melt after while.

It’s straddled on the lip of a Marlboro sign. I track it

every night over the roof of Miller’s Hardware.

They sell guns there. The sun dies

sometimes like a sleeve

ripped from a nightie, orange sometimes like Kelly’s

panties, then Mama’s alarm buzzes

like it’s choked on dry bread

and she leaves for Joe’s under foggy streetlights.

The sweat comes then, cold like it drips

off the toilet tank and the pee

quiet on my legs and the dirty clothes smell

of the closet. Then the wolf reaches in,

shoves my rag doll

over a broom handle.

FREEDOM COUNTER

Gold badge #319 blazes in ER

room three. He escorts his prisoner

who was sliced in a scuffle at County. A rippling

mahogany man whose eyes study our unclean

floor tiles...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Maples
• Standing There
• Siderails
• For Maude Callen: Nurse Midwife, Pineville, NC 1951
• August Delivery
• Blue Lace Socks
• Birch Canoe
• Taste of Tin
• Freedom Counter
• Finding the Pulse
• Letter from Ward Three
• Butterfly
• Warblers
• Violets
• Breathless
• I’m Trying to Be Accurate
• This Red Oozing
• Where I Empty My Pockets
• Notes