Barbara Fletcher

Strike

After several beers and tireless bragging
about the planes of pectoral rock
beneath his shirt, he asks you to hit him
in the chest, really punch him,
put all of your weight into the blow.
And the ale swirling and swilling inside you,
smothers your usual hesitance, chokes off
any sense of momentum or strength.
You strike him just below the collarbone
fist and muscle colliding like stone
against stone. Sparks radiate from his shirt:
small blue and silver comets
shoot outward from chequered flannel,
bursts of cerulean light
that fade in the fall toward worn carpet.
No one else sees them but you and him.
And me.

Oranges

Her hands clasp my face
grip shining cheeks with leathered
palms that smell of oranges
'We give ourselves away
through words' she smiled
and released her citrus grip

Up the aisle I trudged
trailing metres of lace and silk
hands wound around clumps
of white blossoms meant to give me luck or courage
(or something in between)

He grasped my hands
with fierce nervousness
fingernails buffed and cleaned
with orange sticks
My lips spoke 'I will'
and I gave myself away.

Green Woman

In the third pew I saw her
turn to reach for a hymnal:
a woman, turtle-shell green and radiant,
verdant skin and eyes marbled
with veins of copper and silver.
In the stained-glass sunlight
she shone metallic, like the flash
of fish in northern Ontario waters,
or birch leaves in a September wind:
the flashdance of chlorophyll and silver-white.

The others whispered that she was a
victim of a misplaced needle as a child:
a sudden and irrevocable infusion
of emerald-green into every cell.
And she was permanently transformed
into a serpent.

But there was nothing reptilian
about this living jade sculpture,
this perfect singing jewel.

Fissures

We used to come here to swing.
And now, thin branches, black-barked and bare,
spread cracks across the greying sky -
a filigree of fissures where chilled drafts enter
and sweep downward, vibrate trunk and limb,
loosen fragments of sky
that fracture at our feet.

It reminds me of the sidewalk on James Street,
narrow crevices cutting across cold cement,
scars mapping the pathway into small, safe places:
a network of skeletal lines over which we leapt,
superstitiously.

It reminds me more of the grey wall
at the bottom of the stairs in your house,
the large indentation where it connected with
a mother's body, the fine cracks reaching out
like branches of a tree.

Barbara Fletcher is a Canadian poet, writing and publishing across the street from Lake Ontario in a tiny downtown apartment with her husband and cat. A Web Producer and online writer by trade, and a seduced surfer by night, she has been hopelessly addicted to the Internet for years.

Her work has appeared both in print and online in publications such as "Grain", "Conspire", "Melic Review", and "Other Voices".