TRAGIC Poem: Somewhere Else, by Beverly Rose Joyce

My pen lies on peace sign sticks and drags
my Sicilian stump of a thumb no more.

In truth, it has touched no page in over a
decade, its ink a well done gone dry.

It has lived or did it die? among the crumbs
in the back of the granite-roofed, handled
junk drawer where homeless stuff gets
shoved.

Capped, it has sat among stacks of recipes
ripped from magazines in waiting rooms,
who-knows-why kept guides for gadgets I
no longer have, and clipped coupons gone
bad.

My whorls have long been paralyzed by
little shovels.

Slotted, spurtle, serrated, scalloped, and then
more still by their miniature silicone-
covered others.

The ones that fly loops into lips.

So, I apologize if consonants and vowels
swigged down for nearly a fifth of my forty-
something total years come out now not how
I would like.

The letters surprise me.

They wing to the sheet, fast.

Just as they crash at the end of the sing-song
story with a coconut tree on its chunky
cover.

Boom.

All twenty-six fall from behind my brows, a
place I am not sure what to call yet.

My furrow chugs crosses and dots.

It mimics the pulls I take from the short
blue-capped bottles lined in back of the 9
shoe box that rests empty in my closet.

Barren, aside from the pair of gray tree
sticks I never tossed out.

Flat-hatted, this friend sits in front of my
stash, on the bunny-riddled shelf above the
metal rack that palms my collars, pockets,
and sleeves.

I drop in alone, when life gets hard.

The cap I hold today does not twist; it rather
tugs from a fine-tipped shaft with an ad for
some man in a big windowless van’s
company drawn out across its barrel.

The nib drowns in its own blood, shiny
shroud down between nubby hangnails of
bread and lace swaddled in joy.

They were yesterday bound, goods ready for
exchange, but now they pad this tool’s feed.

When slid into its rightful place, it sets free.

A slimmer me smiles from a see-through
pane restrained on all sides by an exactly-
sized pewter frame.

She hangs above our hearth in need of a
scoop.

The rope which binds her there, from the
front, is blind looped and tacked to the
cinched brown paper backing.

She clutches Spring tied in thistle ribbon,
love in a cumber bun at her side.

My hands.

Hands well used.

Lover, they have caressed.

Mother, they have soothed.

They have been everybody’s hands the last
eight and ten years, but mine.

I am a girl of words with much to say.
Good to know you, again.

I scoot between the legs of my oval kitchen
table and palm the leaf, making it no longer
loose.

Maybe it is in this swish that the print finds
the page.

I look at the blue lines we all follow without
asking why we do.

Rules.

And then, the point hits the page.

Not just east of the thin red left stem which
reins in the three holes, but wow…
somewhere else.