THE ASSININE DRIVING REACTION TEST
what does this stupid game mean?
are they watching me through the camera in my computer?
should I be afraid of being hacked by some weirdo insinuating that I am too old to figure this out?
and why do I care what a computer game tells me?
what does it know?
is it yanking my chain?
not that I have a chain
but seriously, who started this?
is this what I will be facing the next time I renew my license?
and if I hit one of the deer in the simulation
should I stop or drive on?
I hit a deer once with my Accord
in the dark on 285 coming home from a visit with friends at their ranch in Hotchkiss on the Western Slope
idiot thing leapt up just as I reached it
smashed its foot into my right front headlight leaving an oomph of bile and grass in the middle of my hood
flipped
landed on its four feet
then took off running into the night trees
while I stopped
and cried and vomited
at the thought that I’d maimed or killed it and then I had to drive on
God, who made up this stupid game? now I am verklempt about a deer on the road twenty years ago
rJo Herman 12/28/15
WINTER WITHOUT BREASTS
I miss my breasts in winter.
For one thing, I get cold.
I keep grabbing for shawls and scarves,
Or folding my arms across my chest;
Anything to hold in the heat.
Who knew?
Cannot feel a thing,
not the softness of a sweater,
nor of a flannel shirt.
Just an overall numbness
and the occasional relentless, phantom itch.
And the tightness of the muscles
where they removed twenty lymph nodes,
highest number on their record board.
The tightness never eases.
The skin is soft and pliable,
that was the goal as
My physical therapist broke down all the fascia,
teaching me how to stretch the skin free.
Oh, and I can eat chicken, again, without gagging.
Kinda…
ME…a work in progress
My left hand is Swedish.
Great Grandma Clara and Great Grandpa Emil
were both Andersons from Sweden.
They met in the states
among the Mid-Western Swedes.
She was disciplined;
he, a tinkerer,
like all the Anderson men who
followed.
My right brain is Scott-Irish.
My Irish Great Grandfather McDowell
came down through Scotland
from Ireland
during the potato famine.
It was said that his daughter,my
Grandma Gwen,
could stretch a nickle through next Thursday.
She made
lace and was very short,
and very stern, but funny.
My blue eyes came from Germany,
along with my Great
Grandfather, Charles Herman, who
arrived late nineteenth century.
rJoHerman 
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