art music poetry

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.

1960
My mother wailing over a casket,
uncontrolled arms flailing
as my eleven year old child eyes
recorded the event through tears
tears surrounded by the South
of Jesus on a fan on a hot day.
Old men wiping sweat from the brow
with a handkerchief
creating commotion at the door.
My father’s black friends wanted to pay their respect.
The crowd said no
These old, then young eyes
saw my five foot one hundred pound mother
tear through that crowd of George Wallace old men
like an unrelenting knife of grief itself
that would not be denied
on this day.
on this day.
On this day her wailing grief
suspended Jim Crow
and for a moment
there was an eleven year old boy
who knew what it meant
when his daddy said to shine.
——————————————————-

By David Michael Jackson

SELLING UP

Never thought your last hours
in this house would be as
keeper of the basement,
with the old furnace
and boxes of musty papers,
your father’s tools,
the webs with their dark,
secret spiders.

You never imagined you could
ever bear to sell this house
but now you find it’s
like those blouses, dresses,
two sizes too small
and out of style anyhow.

Finally, you couldn’t wait
to get rid of it,
a house, too cumbersome,
too demanding, to store memories in.
With the worry of it off your mind,
it can be the lives lived in it
once more.

A little sun pokes through
the clouded windows,
fractured rays of light
to match your scattered insights.
A touch of love here,
a comforting hand there.
A good meal,
a warm fire.
A cozy bed,
the echo of old laughter.

Above, you can hear
the murmur of the real estate agent
telling potential buyers
everything this house is not.
And there you are,
down below, immersed
in its selling points.

THE PACK

Her life is solitaire,
a hundred or more games a day.
Mostly she loses.
And even when she cheats,
the cards still refuse to fall her way.

The suits are worn with age,
sticky from spilled coffee.
But she’s not ready to replace them.
They’re her companions.
And, unlike their flesh and blood equivalents,
they do not die on her.

Sure, they show up as a jack
when an ace would have done
so much better,
or they’re black when red is needed,
or they willfully hide, upside down,
at the bottom of a pile.

But there’s always the next hand,
always more cards to be dealt.
There’s something about
plastic-coated paper.
With the mere touch of it,
she’s one of the pack.

CARNIVAL

I love rinky-dink carnivals
with Ferris wheels of six gondolas
and three-horse carousels.

Imagine a love like that,
in the candy-cane glisten of summer,
where you stop at the top
and the moon’s only
half your height nearer,
or you spin round and round
in an arc so downsized,
you never quite leave where you are.

Imagine a love that wins you
a fist full of cheap trinkets,
and a button-eyed bear
with his stuffing burst loose.
And just for knocking down
some tin cans with a baseball.

The prizes are worth less
than the cost of participating.
Imagine a love like that.
I could name you at least three.

John Grey is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, City Brink and Tenth Muse. Latest books, “Subject Matters”,” Between Two Fires” and “Covert” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Paterson Literary Review, Amazing Stories and Cantos.

The Old Men Walk
and want to run again
To run again.
I walk my three miles
because I’m glad I can walk
There are others like me.
I pass them.
One walks briskly and says little.
He doesn’t have to.
I see him walking his walk so resolute
as if he sees his last walk
or that wheelchair
and he’s gonna walk,
by God!
I wonder if he knows the Doctor,
ear, nose and throat who walks every day,
the two miles and back
to a restaurant.
He has a new white beard
and wishes to go to Florida.
These are my heroes
these days of hoping
for pleasant conversations.
as I talk to strangers
and trees.
I spoke to a big hickory today
and spread some nuts for my
wisest friend.
The young people go by,
jogging
usually without the need
for pleasant conversations.
I have a hard time forgiving them.
We should have never taught them
to not talk to strangers.
Oh leaola
oh leaola
You must talk to strangers
and trees