Pruning the Vines
Inside the Veiled Bonnets
Saint in a Box
Risks of the Vulnerable
The vines on the house were bullying the windows.
Although I didn't want to, I'd promised to clip them all myself
and I'm proud to have kept my word.
The timing was bad. Moist morning, already hot, sprinkles
that other days I'd welcome. Under the obvious spider nests,
mosquitoes lurked. The steamy plumbers had arrived
and shut off all the water. I yearned to get done.
That very same day, I'd vowed to pitch my stash of intimate letters.
No second glances, no looking back.
Garbed against the hateful poison ivy, I forced myself to stay on target.
But tempted to divert -- to yank the meandering English Ivy stems
and leaves that mingle with the poisons clinging to blood-red bricks,
I sliced with my lethal clippers only the enemy roots below.
My caution expanded despite my inner seething,
If he were doing this, the rashes surely would had erupted.
The man is stubbornly oblivious to danger.
The dirty deeds were finally finished.
The noxious vines are banished to the yard waste bin;
the letters in their boxes to recycling,
The nearly naked house-front stares ahead.
Called out to the darkness before the dawn. Waiting for something expected, unexpected. You ring the bell but she doesn’t come. You ring again, a shadow slides slowly, a curtain trembles. Slight light appears, some bony fingers in the window pane. “Who is it?” “Me.” Hooded, she opens the door. Hoodie, we call it now. Bundled up for outside, layers, but the house is warm. She complains of the cold. She can’t get warm. This sounds familiar to me now, but it was a long time ago. Decades, but I still see her. In the mirror now I see her and she is me. I was afraid then, I dreaded going there. I am afraid of so much now, frightened to look up lattice in MayoClinic.org, to tell the doctor what’s really going on. A great aunt, garbed for the winter. So thin. I told my little sister the sunken eyes would keep sinking until they disappeared inside entirely. She believed me. Even indoors our aunt would wear the blackish animal around her neck, a shiny bead for its eye. Its long ratty snout was real, its lips apparently glued shut so the teeth were hidden. Were there really teeth in there? I look in the mirror and see her. What did she call it, her fur, so stylish then, along with a small velvet hat and wisp of veil?
Father Louis was not born to rules.
yet into silence he burrowed,
chanting at Compline,
working the hills and fields.
Within the walled grounds,
he soon leaped over boundaries.
Someone was paying attention.
Someone was getting nervous.
Into the East he wandered,
then showered, died clean,
slaughtered
in the sultry heat by his own fan.
He was returned, the relic of this place.
It is not easy to tell his box
from all the others,
a simple white cross
in a locked courtyard.
The monks have tried hard
to keep him from turning into a shrine.
Maybe I got the show wrong after all:
stuffing the glow-in-the dark rosary
into my mouth, making it tumble
like teeth, in the dark,
to amaze my siblings.
Like the priests whose hands
gleam green in hell
for all eternity,
I may be marked.
There is a tree, solemn, pointed, sign
of mourning, dotting the rocks and sand.
How can it live in such an arid atmosphere?
There is a tree that masquerades
as evergreen. When fall approaches
its leaves turn orange and drop.
Their name evades, except in the minds' eye.
Which of them is true?
The winds kick up, seeds shoot
from the vessels, yearning for sunshine.
This season for growing will not cooperate.
Ann Neuser Lederer was born in Ohio and has also lived and worked in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kentucky as a Registered Nurse. Prior to nursing she studied art and earned degrees in anthropology. Her poetry and nonfiction appear in online and print journals; anthologies such as Best of the Net, A Call To Nursing, Pulse, and The Country Doctor Revisited; and in her chapbooks, Approaching Freeze, The Undifferentiated, Weaning the Babies and Fly Away Home.
