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Working Out a Splinter at Three O’clock on Good Friday Afternoon
You can’t go easy, get the big bits out
and call it good –
not if you want it all gone,
not if it’s buried, broken off
deep as the things that prick
at your dreams
when you sleep all the way through Saturday.
You have to keep at it until it all runs clear,
like there’s water in the blood.
Then it’s clean.
Then it’s finished.
There will be a scar.
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About the Author: Steve Brisendine is a writer, poet, occasional artist and recovering journalist living in Mission, Kansas. His poetry appears in the third and most recent volume of the 365 Days Poets anthology and in The Rye Whiskey Review. His first collection of poems, The Words We Do Not Have, is due out in spring 2021 from Spartan Press.
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Image Credit: Fritz Henle “Wood pile at the Orton farm, Marshfield, Vermont” (1942) The Library of Congress
As It Ought To Be 