*Featured image courtesy of Tama66 on Pixabay*
Happy New Year! Let’s kick it off with a wonderful set of poems from longtime FC contributor, John Grey.
CAR NERD
On his wall, he’s hung a poster
of an automobile cutaway.
It’s his version of Miss August in a swim-suit.
The poster’s so detailed you
can see the ball joint, the bushings,
tie rod, disc brake rotor, universal joint.
The tiny boxes with the arrows are unnecessary.
He knows each part by name and function.
I’m a book worm. I accept that.
But he’s this other kind of worm,
hatched in floor pans, fed on exhaust,
dressed in STP.
And, on his dresser, there’s this photograph
of a bright red mustang circa 1965.
One loving glance at it
and he’s on the highway,
foot to the floor,
chewing up and spitting out the scenery.
He’s still not old enough to drive.
But he’s already over the speed limit.
REGARDING THE END
It’s not that I didn’t want to visit her
in hospital –
she is my aunt after all –
and she is on the mend
and will be home by next week
but – and it’s a big but –
it’s that walk through the wards
that does me in.
Look at the old man
trudging behind his walker.
And that chubby woman
in her double-wide wheelchair.
And the retired nun that Bessie
shares a room with.
She’s hooked up to a dozen tubes.
She doesn’t stir.
My wife barely speaks
the whole time,
not even when we sit bedside.
All this talk of our future together
and we’re surrounded by another version
of the time to come.
A nurse stops in.
She smiles.
But like an alligator smiles
at a fawn
while thinking,
a year or two from now you’re mine.
My aunt is cheery enough
but she takes life in a downward direction
just by being dressed in that light blue gown
and tucked between the sheets
with a vase of flowers on a table
and a metal curtain track above her head.
My wife says we should take life
one day at a time.
But doesn’t the end do that already.
THE LAST DEATH CAMP SURVIVOR
In her Brooklyn lebensraum,
she putters about her apartment,
cane in one hand,
fresh flowers, from her window box,
in the other.
Only her bones know
how old she is.
Not the landlady.
Not the other tenants.
She admits to being
“plenty ancient.”
The family photograph sits
on her tiny bedside table.
It would be nowhere
if the little girl in her mother’s arms
had not survived.
Occasional tears remind her
that age is no cure.
Her accent hasn’t changed so much
from the day that she last saw them.
She’ll go to her grave
still hardening her w’s into v’s.
If you want to hear her story,
the eyes will have to do
because the tongue won’t go there.
Never married,
no children,
what will die with her
is dead already.
LOVE LETTER
Dear river.
You’re slow.
You’re late arriving
and you have no idea how late.
In the lake’s glossy afternoon shimmer,
there’s not much happening.
Everything’s fixed in time and space.
The surrounding rocks are dry.
There’s very little lapping at the edges.
Where’s all that snow melt
I’ve heard so much about?
The boats are moored and bored.
They’d rather rot
than putt-putt about in these measly depths.
Sure, I saw the sign
nailed to the tree.
It said, “Climate’s not what it used to be.”
But my expectations can’t read.
So hear my voice.
Get with the quick and gushing flow.
Roll down the mountain
furious and foaming.
Waken this body of water
from its rippling slumber.
River, you’re like a lover to me.
You bore my childhood.
And not forgetting the twins –
me at twenty,
me at thirty.
I feel as sad as a coffin.
Don’t close the lid for good.
Yours, with affection,
John.
THE CRUELEST
If it wasn’t for spring,
there’d be certainty.
The cold would lead to more cold.
The warm would be the forerunner of warmth.
But the thermometer pulses like pain.
And the wind just blows the way the wind blows.
Spring is supposed to be about rebirth,
but April drizzle kills my day out.
It’s when the birds fly north
and I long to fly south.
And the Earth should be summer bound,
but it makes too many bathroom stops.
Sky is gray one moment, blue the next.
Freeze thaws so the next freeze
has something to work on.
Like flowers, I redouble my efforts.
Like flowers, I lose track of my intention.
INSECT TRAPPED IN WINDOW
You flap your wings,
with a buzz I can’t hear,
thumping against the glass
that promises sky
and the pane that offers
the sanctity of my room.
You’re a gnat, or a mite,
too small, too insignificant,
to warrant a name in my world,
though even the tiniest of creatures
conjures up a vision
of sleeping sickness in west Africa
or plagues in the Middle Ages.
I could set you free,
send you back out
into the world.
Or I could even
follow up your liberation
with a loud thwack
from a rolled-up magazine.
I seem to be in charge here.
It’s a feeling I don’t get often
so I could just thank you for that.
HOLOCAUST CHILD.
She was a child
when there were no children.
She was the youngest
which just about made her the eldest,
when- soldiers- came
and took away all who could speak.
She was passed around
from neighbor to neighbor,
a secret who cried
uncontrollably at night, :
who ransacked the patience of even the kindest.
Somehow she survived
which wasn’t done much in those days.
And she grew up or,
at least, her years on earth
approached how old she felt.
She was adopted after the war,
moved with her new family
to the States.
She went to school,
learned English.
Her schoolmates were children.
They mistook her for one.
She worked as, a seamstress,
married a much older man.
They had two boys, two girls.
She called them her children
when any word would have done just as well.
CLIFF DIVERS
Divers wait in apron light,
the tree-shrouded waiting room,
before moving slowly
to cliff-edge, grabbing
a spare breath from somewhere,
then plunging into the waters below.
One after another,
they soar downward
into the deep pool,
disappear in a sliced splash,
before emerging in a cloud of bubbles,
like shivering stars
in a universe of cold surfaces.
John Grey returns to share his writing on Fictional Cafe for the seventh time. His poetry is always welcome. John is an Australian poet, US resident, recently published in New World Writing, North Dakota Quarterly and Tenth Muse. Latest books, “Between Two Fires”, “Covert” and “Memory Outside The Head” are available through Amazon. Work upcoming in Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, Birmingham Arts Journal, La Presa and Shot Glass Journal.
