I can’t hear you, Tracy

I can’t hear you, Tracy, the sun is in my eyes like a strange portrait of light, and I’m stuck in a seashell, drowning in the sound of the ocean. I am staggering like I’m drunk. Slurring my words. Having a seizure over and over again and I just wanted to smile for you and talk about that day at Peace Valley Park when your clothes were plain and everything was going right. When the sun was my ally and everything was green, even the dirt. This strange sphere of a planet dropped me off on the side of the road when I wasn’t looking. I’m at the graveyard now. My tombstone reads rest in pieces. I can’t hear you, Tracy. I can’t even hear myself. Tip toeing into traffic. Knees all crumpled up. How many shades of blue can one man radiate? The clock ticks like Chinese water torture over me and I wish I knew what you were saying, with your hands in your pockets, walking along the grass somewhere.

Cocktails Served

Some find their way in to escape.

Others find solace in empty conversations and stale beers.

Most all of them have a reason and the best never needed one at all.

For me it’s a feel more than anything.

It is in the night itself.

For I am forever chasing what I can never regain.

A shared bit of mystery.

A simple release and nothing more.

A dark corner and a good laugh.

We gave up toys for vices and never truly grew up at all.

Maybe there is hope for tonight to be different from all the rest.

But at least the drinks are cold.

As the people that serve them.

Tip to all.

Don’t go blind looking into computer screens.

For purpose when a night’s escape is far more enticing.

I may go home alone.

But at least I gained a peace of mind, chasing something more than cyber bullshit and empty hours.

The dog walks itself and I never was intended for the leash.

The drinks are my escape because they fill a void, another never will.

They may come at a hell of a price.

News flash so do lawyers and divorces.

Keep that sunny side shit to yourself.

Nurse, refill please.

Istanbul Expat Women

Hold a match up to a thread from your carpet, does it smell like burnt hair?

The days when I lived in Turkey seem tinged with sepia now

We remember the same stories with different friends in the leading roles.

Expats being bad in the heat of summer.

Daytime “ladies’ lunches” behind closed curtains

bottles of Georgian wine, hidden in cloth shopping bags

Neatly wrapped to hide the clinking

To protect us from the dedekodu

Inside the cement walls, behind closed curtains

We drank, laughed, cried, told the same stories

With our own voices

Our magic carpet rides didn’t always end well

But at our ladies’ lunches we gave each other tips

About how to fall off gracefully

And how to tell if your carpet was silk or synthetic

Windows closed, aircon on, we hid our voices from the neighbors

Until the stroke of five, when we had to start collecting empty plates,

Water glasses stained with burgundy,

Pack up our imported Tupperware and go back to our husbands,

Head to our shift at the language school,

Mask back in place, magic carpet fired up,

Always silk or wool, never polyester.

Have to keep up appearances.

Here, take a piece of gum before you go, you don’t want to stink

Of alcohol on the bus or in the taksi.

Now, years later, I can only look back at the photos

And wonder how you all are…

Stephanie Johnson’s poetry has appeared in numerous publications including Witty Partition, Sink Hollow, Forum Literary Magazine, and others. She is an Associate Editor at Novel Slices, a new literary magazine based solely on novel excerpts, and has spent most of her adult life overseas teaching English literature, ESL and Spanish. Her writing usually focuses on the slightly uncomfortable space of the expatriation/ repatriation experience. She is currently based in San Francisco. Find her on Instagram at @stephaniejohnsonpoetry and Twitter at @stephan64833622 

Division Street

This poem is for Autism Awareness month, which is in April each year.

Link to the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network with more information.

Division Street

A street divides her thoughts from her lips,

I see my reflection in the puddle of her eyes;

Still innocent to the decorated world around her,

Averting the sunshine of the faces in her skies.

Her smile shines on her colorful creations,

Her imagination holds the key to wonderland,

She cradles the many characters with care —

So please, imagine holding me in your hand.

Hush my sweet baby, I’ll sing you a lullaby,

Dream, I dream of the day we sing your song;

Hush my sweet baby, I’ll sing you a lullaby,

Dream, dream of the day we sing your song.

Her sweet, sweet hum echoes into my heart

As exploration takes her from dolls to doors,

From goldfish to gates, from swings to the stars,

Taking big, big steps gazing up from the floor.

The street which divides narrows each day

As moments of connection draw us closer,

And the song of our voices begin to harmonize,

So one day, we will cross that street together!

Chris Butler is an illiterate poet shouting from the Quiet Corner of Connecticut. 

Belly 

The earth will become the oceans, 

when it succumbs to the froth of the waves replacing cotton ball clouds, 

where one can only swim in all directions towards the slithering glimmers of light 

and submerged to plug the hole at the bottom of the sky, in a no fly ozone 

surrounded by dangling tentacles with suctioning barbs and incandescent monsters. 

Whales with mouths, the stomach and the appetite to swallow whole souls 

only for an eternity of digestive processes that is a fisherman’s purgatory, 

until I’m born again out of the propulsion of whipping fins and the waist high entrails  

that one must wade through, unable to doggy paddle or stroke over tidal waves, 

along with the noxious smog atmosphere of salt water and dry air, 

untethered from the belly to spill me up and wipe me down 

onto the salted seas of sand that stranded the last of us 

on an endless palm oasis of ice water cubed in the sinking of sacrificial glaciers, 

pulling us deeper away from every surface.   

  

Carbon’s Footprints 

The path of carbon’s footprints  

across the beach’s sand, 

still will not wash away  

despite the tide’s undulating  

tsunami of vengeance.    

I am my own black hole… 

…as an astrological waste of space, lackadaisically laying in an inflatable tube down a lazy river of darkness, making my way across an endless nothing, occasionally waving a helpless hello as the stream lures me further down the weightless torrent. But then I am pushed and pulled by forces with such gravitas that their gloriousness simply goes by “gravity”, stretching my inert inertia until my muscles suffer from the slightest strain of atrophy to rupture any rapture, until I am down-streamed up and away from one bobbing gaseous sphere and towards an impending one of dirt. All kinetic and spastic energy is then expunged and redacted, causing me to curl up into a fetal ball to collect all of the dust particles with static shock, until I snatch larger and denser objects in my porcelain drain, tightening them in my grasp until the last atom pops.   

 

Each tongue has individual truths… 

Never mind the words, 

mind the meaning hiding behind the words.   

And in the end… 

Everyone will steal a quote from someone famous, 

because they never believed in the legend of themselves.   

Prayer

Prayer remains a reflex

even after all these years

of silence – wishes ungranted,

questions unanswered

puzzles unsolved

a reflex, a response when one of those

moments strike

the sunshine on a cold morning

catches our eye, or

bad news from television, this front or that

a diagnoses we didn’t expect

a phone call in the middle of the night

the doorbell

someone asking for help you can’t give

then they ask you to pray

and you remember the words

string them together

a hiccup, a reflex

something you try to perform

in the silent theater of your life.

List of Deceased Classmates

First thing I thought of when I saw it was

my college yearbook off there somewhere

collecting dust in some box, on some shelf.

Yearbooks make sense at first, fresh faces

of classmates, some you recall, then others

you think you recognize from their pictures,

formal picture of each one, then activities,

clubs and teams. They goes on a shelf, then

disappears into the years. Everything ages

we know, everything we know ages, even

the classmates frozen in time in yearbooks

age, live lives after then, do great things or

little things, careers and families, the stuff

that fills obituaries or are hinted at in lists

like the one I got today, the list of deceased

classmates. The list seems long for a class

that was fairly small – I count forty-four

and know there’s more out there, or should

I say not out there, more names, more dates.

I should find my yearbook and look at faces

and names, all of us, before that list began

being compiled.

 An Ache

The pain in my right elbow this morning

reminds me,

puts a bit of emphasis on

the hold my body has over my mind,

how time has brought the two

to cross purposes.

My body says one thing, complains on and on

about this pain or that,

about a weakness in that or that

a shortage, a soreness, a stinging,

while my mind moves on, runs marathons

sprints, sets records and ambitions

does all the things it did back when even

my elbow didn’t ache and the physical part

kept up with what I was thinking.

But this morning I’m reminded of how

my mind rides around in a vehicle that’s

wearing out, piece by piece

is riding around in a body that hopes to 

at best, at least

limp across the finish line.