THE WALLEYED PIKE

Memory is what memory is,
a dream-snatch, an etch-a-sketch,
a gate through the English heather,
a stone path to the front door,
the way the leaves smell when wet.
Some report being lulled up the stairs
by a low progression of chords
or a lilting call to prayer.
Some say harmonium. Some say whorehouse.
Many reference storage and retrieval,
a lure, a walleyed pike
reeled to the surface in Minnesota sun.
Many report an amnesia.
Tune in. Turn on. Drop out.
Many describe a connubial submersion,
a concatenation of juices.
Some go into the bedroom.
Many report a shifting floorplan,
a dislocation of hallways and doors.
Some say entry. Some say escape.
And then there are the tenants.
Reports are wildly varied here.
Suffice it to say there are occupants
holding possession by force
ignoring the pay or quit notices.
The floorboards creak. The faucets drip.
Many report feeling like trespassers,
Tiny voices, the building blocks of music.
Many look through the back windows.
Some say teeter-totter, some say see saw.
Some say pump organ, some say mouth harp,
a poker and tongs, an urn full of ashes,
the sound a clock makes when it’s coming unwound,
the place a sock spoons in the dryer,
the sound a lock makes when it bites down.
Giant oaks octopus in the wind.
Over time many report a dwindling recall,
an empty goblet on the hearthstone,
dampered breathing through the flue.
Some ask what it means to reside?
Some bellow breath into the fire.

THE SCRIPT

I don’t feel insane. But that’s hardly the test.
Worst case scenario: things are precisely how they seem.
Cracks appear, large enough to doggy-paddle in:
Rhodesia and lesions on the brain.
Rain spirits down like glitter.
Disbelief is a species of belief.
The script runs beneath our feet.
Even those who cannot see it are guided.
What can be done meets what will be done
and then the wolves come.
Even the elders have never seen this.
The script screams across our foreheads.
A figure of Jesus of Rio is thrown.
It hits the wall in shattered animation.
Oh look! I’m totally telling this story
of my Grandpa after the funeral.
The kid in the drive-thru bottle shop
asks him how his day is going
and he says, “I buried my wife today.”
This sequence is not arbitrary.
These words were always there
awaiting their moment in the air.
The drive-thru kid has the decency
not to say, “I hope she was dead.”
The said and the unsaid are fraternal twins
bivalved to the same half shell,
two old plough hands with rumpled hats
sharing a hipflask of hootch,
as the sun squats over its latrine.
The script howls through our dreams,
a monsoon of ancient dialogue,
a smorgasbord of swirling words,
a roadmap for when the shit comes down.

BUILDING THE PLANE AS WE FLY IT

Light glistens the skin,
a luminosity.
Listen. The price of silence
has plummeted.
Language is the new crypto.
Is it artificial? Yes.
Is it intelligent? Not very.
But it is fast and dirty
like creek run during snowmelt.
4.7 billion cubic meters
of unused hand sanitizer
exist on earth – roughly
the land mass of West Africa.
Okay, I made that up.
But you see my point.
Anything can be typed,
digested and digitized,
spat back at us as fact.
Raptors soar in perfect arcs
that prophesize the rapture.
I’m about to be activated.
“Sir, this is a Denny’s.”

Edward Johnson is a civil rights attorney who has spent the past 30 years representing people living on and over the edge of homelessness. He has poetry recently out or forthcoming from Eclectica Magazine, Indefinite Space, Ginosko Literary Journal, Packingtown Review, Evergreen Review, Whisk(e)y Tit Journal and Abraxas Review.

YOUR PROM DATE

Everyone’s a winner.
How I hate that.
Everything is rotten in the world.
Now that makes sense.
This rented suit doesn’t fit
and the new shoes are torture
on my feet.
I’m a bundle of guilt
from previous poor decisions.
Did I mention how sweaty my palms are?
I fear one wrong word from me
and the entire evening is undone.
I do come bearing flowers.
And I drove here in my dad’s car.
Luckily, I didn’t hit anything.
Besides, I’m sure that four years from now
I’ll look back at this moment
and laugh my stupid head off.
People will ask, “Are you okay?”
Well, Samantha, what do you think.
Am I?

THE MICE

I don’t see the mice
in the leafage under the backyard trees.
Many generations of the creatures have lived there
but they have learned the art of the invisible,
know my habits, react to the absence of them.

With our difference in customs, our amenable schedules,
we do not cross paths.
They’re in a different time-zone
under the nose of my clock.
We have that special rapport, the mutual understanding,
of those who have nothing to do with one another.

It’s worlds within worlds,
just like neighborhoods within cities,
and cities within states, and so on, and so on.
Someone says I should get a cat.
But why give the country ideas?

WHAT’S WRONG EXACTLY

The whispering
of the doctors
nurses
and finally the
caregivers

grows louder
and louder
day by day

until ultimately
it’s one great
pulverizing sound

that can be heard
throughout the hospital
the long term care facility,

even by the corpse
in the funeral home.

If you ask the body,
he will tell you.

“The news is not good.”

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, River And South and The Alembic. Latest books, “Bittersweet”, “Subject Matters” and “Between Two Fires” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, White Wall Review and Flights.