B.J. Buckley

Cranium

 
Black cargo hold
                          she says
Lightless room
                      she says
Sometimes
                no door into the
Skull the polished
                            stark snow white of
Bone or she says
                          I can see out or I
Can hear out but
                         I can’t get out
She says
            Don’t you think those
Tangles are
                 unintentionally
Beautiful?  (Prions
                             no pronouns no
Her me I)
             I was an actress once
She says but
                  choreography is
Geometry and I forget
                                  (Who are you? Oh.)
My lines and the brain
                                  you know is
The consistency of jello
                                    no shape at all melts
In the heat  of mis-dis-
                                   remembery
My husband was
                         defenstrated she says
And now everything’s
                                  out the window

B.J. Buckley is a Montana poet and writer who has worked in Arts in Schools and Communities programs throughout the West and Midwest for more than four decades. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Grub Street, About Place Journal, Sequestrum, december, CutThroat: A Journal of the Arts, Aesthetica, Hole in the Head Review, Sugar House Review, and The Southern Humanities Review Online, among others. Her chapbook, In January, the Geese, won the 35th Anniversary 2021 Comstock Review Poetry Chapbook Prize.