Primadone Nights
The pills are so tiny, so white.
Dead ringers for Granny’s saccharine
she plopped in her coffee,
making the smallest splash.
My Primadone nights are thick with sleep
heavy as concrete, and persuasive dreams.
If I travel to the bathroom, I get lost
in the house we’ve lived in for 18 years.
I sleepwalk, always having the same delusion:
we are staying someplace
and I can’t find the bathroom.
I find it, eventually, then trace the trail
of my husband’s snores back to bed. Sometimes
I’m not sure it’s him, so I have
To wake him to be certain.
When he wakes up, I tell him, excitedly,
“They have a bathroom just like ours!”
My dreams are predictable. They always
pose a problem — I try to solve it all night.
It often involves logistics: getting groups
of strangers to move here or there,
or getting them to agree.
New obstacles appear continually
and the problems don’t get solved.
Sometimes I wake up in a sweat, relieved.
So happy I don’t have to grow wings and fly
to a place I’ve never heard of
with ten other fledgling flyers,
all of them arguing about the best route,
what to pack, what to leave behind, when to go.
Broken Bone Stories
The bright orange cast on my broken arm
makes a good ice-breaker for conversations
with homeless people on the light rail platform.
Seems like everyone wants to know how I did it, wants to regale me
with their own broken bone stories. Mine was simple.
I fell, ice skating with my adult son on his birthday. I temporarily
forgot that I hadn’t skated in decades and my muscle memory
had lapsed into complete amnesia. I did not hear a crack, as I’ve heard
many do when something breaks, but I could tell right away,
from the penetrating quality of the pain, that at age 70, I had just experienced
my first broken bone. One guy on the light rail platform told of practicing
his balance on a high wall before falling off. Another said he was shoved down
some stairs by his father. A skinny guy said he jumped out of a tree
and landed wrong. The day he got his cast off he went right back up the tree
and jumped again, landing on – and breaking—the other leg, a narrative
some called “hilarious.” The crowd on the train platform also wants to give me
unsolicited information about the wither and rot going on right now
inside my cast. About how the dead skin will start itching so bad
when everything starts healing, how I will want
to poke something sharp down inside to scratch, but I shouldn’t
because I could get an infection. This chitchat goes on while
a guy in a hoodie sells light rail tickets good for the next 90 minutes
for less than half their normal price. They’re specially marked
for disabled people, but he sells to all buyers. A buff guy (maybe 20)
who says he’s on his way to the gym buys one. He offers me a drag off
some brown thing he’s smoking. I decline, though I’m moved by his gesture.
The cast shows I’m broken and people make way for me on the train.
“How’d you do it?” is the first question I get when I sit down.
A Little Science Lesson
It happened while we were in the kitchen decorating cookies,
using butter knives to spread white icing on little wreaths, trees and stars,
then sprinkling them with green and red sugar crystals.
We were carefully placing those hard silver balls that cause agony to fillings,
cracked fragments of candy canes and the beloved cinnamon red hots
when the can flew up to the ceiling with a loud bang, its top a jagged knife.
It sprayed Campbell’s fragrant oyster stew across cabinets, ceilings and sunny yellow walls before crashing to the counter. We screamed, although none of the soup
landed on our cookies, and the metal top, which traveled inches from our faces,
didn’t slice into either one of us. We learned a little science lesson:
an unattended can of frozen soup submerged in a water-filled saucepan
becomes something quite different after the water boils away: it turns into a bomb.
I don’t believe that product, so calamitous for easily distracted mothers
sipping cocktails in the living room, is made by Campbell’s anymore.
We always marveled that it didn’t kill us. Others may not have been so lucky.
Black Dog Keeps His Job
Susan Wolbarst’s poems are nothing like Edgar Allan Poe’s. For starters, they are written and edited on a computer. There are several additional differences which she won’t bore you by delineating. Susan lives and writes in rural Gualala, California. Her poetry has been published in Plainsongs, pioneertownlit.com, Naugatuck River Review, and other digital and print journals. Five of her poems were included in the Canadian anthology Alchemy and Miracles, Nature Woven Into Words. A chapbook of her poems called It’s Over was published in September 2025 by Finishing Line Press.
