Two Serious Ladies is named for the 1943 short novel by Jane Bowles.

“I have my happiness, which I guard like a wolf, and I have authority now and a certain amount of daring, which, if you remember correctly, I never had before.”


― Jane Bowles
Two Serious Ladies

 

Poems by Marie Buck

Cream-Colored Weapon
For the Woman in the Blue Bra

It was thick
The entire fascist room

With anti-intellectual and war-mongering
Feelings

Capital letters were written
In a spiral pattern on my body

And in a mine
In the familiar triangle

Some comments about unemployment
Touched me on the face

But yet my face was in your hair
So I breathed fine. I said

Fuck the certain price of goods
Fuck to adjust the area

Spread to fuck the fruit
Slipping up behind you


But a bureau deemed me
A driver’s engine

Unprintable
As a smooth continuous dance  



Recent Variations in a Managed Closure
for Troy Davis

My connectivity and the loans available to me
Afforded an evening of laughter and warmth
Yet still I minded it very much when she stretched us
Too thin. She wanted embellished feelings
Utopian olives stuffed with almonds
There’s the bridle in the closet
The beret on the banister
You and I look at one another in confusion
Gently rubbing the paper against the cheek
Of an undisclosed third party  



Settler Colony
for Scott Olsen

He gives a nursery to a girl
Who emanates, girthy, through the floodlights

She dreamt of sleeping
In her own bed

Knowing a cupboard
Could feel raw in your hands

While the greens in the garden
Fluttered against an inner arm

More to the class war
Than it otherwise might have been

The tones were working it like girls
The opening in her heart baited and switched

He gives a nursery to a girl
Who emanates, girthy, through the floodlights

He doesn’t give a nursery to a widow
The tones were working it like girls

I was named after a police dancer
My slow, lyrical, and obsolete sweetheart

My life was the subliminal tape recording
The Israeli Defense Force

Me, beaten into submission
One’s feet in the sand

I was named after a rawness in my hands
More to the police force

I opened a dear friend
Delving in the poor soil  



Small Truck
For Mohamed Bouazizi

Hello! Aggression is a wedding
A fireball in strike
Deep within the raging storm
That is the great red spot of Jupiter

A businesswoman points
Her pistol
At the computer monitor
A small car

Assesses the site
In front of the spraying water
The work reference
Has to be pulled in

And centered
A violent wave breaks
On the glowing knife
At the scene,

I hold my money
Feeling a heartfelt wish
My armed robbery
A small and wet hoody

Collapse
Beneath a soft skin
The point is nobody should
Have to live like this



Marie Buck has a new chapbook, Amazing Weaponsout on Scary Topiary Press.

Death of a Child Model by Kari Larsen

These Gorgeous Girls by Kayla Morse