BANISHED

  the night 
she put me out, rumpled clothing 
  overflowing a garbage bag 


beers at turnstiles 
  subways ... tunnels 
plastic seat sleep, steel 


  tracks, wheels screaming, 
the bag heavy, heavier 
  every hour. 


second night: 
  three leaning sheetrock pages 
whole but cracked in undone 


  construction underneath the bridge 
a strung-out hooker letting me sleep 
  for free in her plasterboard triangle 


I buried my bag of clothes 
  in a hole beside the lean-to 
  believed I might return. but never.
 
 

PO@PO 

I'm pissed off at the post office 
for "losing" my Land's End shirt. 
Last week I paid for three pure cotton T-necks 
and this morning I received only two 
in a torn and scotch-taped jiffy bag 
just three shopping days before Christmas. 
I'm pissed off at the larcenous mail handler 
who slit open my Land's End bag 
in a back room or bathroom or corner-
some empty spot lit with a low-watt bulb 
like an illegal poker game or a crap shoot - 
and squeezed just one shirt past the paper crumbs 
dribbling out of the slit in the jiffy. 
Maybe they swiped only the one blue shirt 
because it matched their dark blue Postal Service uniform. 
maybe they wore my navy Land's End shirt 
right to the desk where they zipped off some tape 
patched up the slit and marked my package "Damaged". 


and maybe they didn't even have to steal my shirt 
or smirk their clerkly faces when I stepped up to complain: 
maybe it's time the customers start going postal 
and maybe I'll be first - bursting in the front doors 
of the biggest branch of the worst monopoly in town 
to blast them all down with this poem. 
 
 

PASSING GEAR 

Was it anybody's brother? Some 
suicidal smash-up by the side of the road, another 


motorcycle maniac gone early to heaven? 
He didn't plan it, had 


plane tickets and arrangements, 
gave notice at the job where he had worked: 


moving on, moving on. The cops cracked gum, 
casual among the brains 


skin and gristle strewn 
down ten deadly yards of the Nassau Expressway, 


among the smashed-flat EMT badge and shredded 
polyester uniform tatters, among the unhealable broken


hands and bones of a healer. 
They brought his body to where he'd brought so many 


half-dead old patients from the Homes, 
trim in his pressed uniform, 

blond and polite and unbearably young. 
Tonight it's his turn on the gurney, 

and all the medics who failed to be killed 
after some routine evening overtime shift 

are milling back and forth in the familiar ER 
with the familiar body on the table, 
strangely breathless. 
 
 

Jackie Sheeler is a NY poet. She co-hosts a weekly poetry reading on Friday evening at the Pink Pony and is the publisher of www.poetz.com. you can reach her at jackie@poetz.com.
 

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CRAYOLA WARS

The color of the body 
has been at the beginning 
of far too many wars 


and misunderstandings. I would never be 
shot down 41 times in some hallway 
by men with eyes as blue 


as my own handsome cop-daddy's eyes 
because my body is the color of protection. 
Every day I strut past the target-practice hearts of the police 


holding court on the street, and I'm never afraid. 
I have lived among badges all my life 
growing numb, going blind to the uniforms. 


Darken me into cowardice, then: 
tan me black, fill 
in between my lines with Burnt Siena 


the best of all those good Crayola names 
the blackest of the browns 
more certain than Raw Umber to result 


in frequent frisks and eventual capture 
in this grown-up game of cops and maybe      robbers 
where the cap guns always malfunction 


and bang bang you're dead 
is written in blood the color of tenement brick 
drying on the stoops of certain neighbors. 
 
 

AUNT DORA

Surrealistic statistics--
43 dead and the newscaster 
is impartial, dealing with facts, just the facts. 


After all, he says, it's no Krakatoa--
a "minor catastrophe", nothing 
to poison your sweet sleeps with fear. 


Behind eyes that match his grey necktie 
and a manner more tepid than grey, 
he compares circumstances, cites 
various governmental studies, 

assures us of our safety. "Besides,"  
he continues, "hundreds died in Oklahoma. 
A few dozen isn't that bad." 


Television's great puddle-eye 
pipes his face into thousands of rooms 
then flickers and hums, as if in affirmation.


Aunt Dora settles across her couch, reassured, 
as the screen explodes into commercials 
and she halfheartedly tries to decide 
which detergent actually is best.