Back Then
Starlight was dull compared to hope and
we had similar cars and people would leave things in the wrong back seats and
there was no such thing as drinking too much because we had bitters and
soda for the morning.
Morning always came too soon
back then, and beating the birdsong home was the challenge. We took black marker to our white waitress shoes and went out after work even though we promised not to.
We wrote broken pieces of poems on cocktail napkins next to piano melodies and pretended we weren’t waiting for a knight in some kind of armor.
Leave the white horse outside.
His shit gets everywhere.
There was nothing that vodka and a few lines couldn’t fix,
no problem too big, no sex so tender
it could not be forgotten.
The ancient legend was that you always returned once you slept in the mountain’s shadow, but there are no ancients left.
Now I
only drink wine and
now I
hide from the crumpled cocktail napkins
filed away in a metal drawer, afraid to open something like hope
to find only ash.
• • •
Blueprint
Staring at the whorls of my life like that knot in the wood in the door as I sit on the toilet—they move as I ponder and piss.
You aren’t your mother, the shrink says again. You can shoot her every time you think of her. Now. THAT went over well at work—me and my imaginary pistol.
Smoke another, pop another, drink another—self-medication is what the 70s taught me. I do it well.
You need to learn to play, the shrink says again. So. Waking up in a strange bed in a delusion of morning doesn’t count as play I take it?
The whorls, like my fingerprint, have brought me back to the beginning of something, if I only knew what. There is a pattern. I want to see a pattern. I need to see a pattern other than the Fibonacci sequence. Other than the fractals, other than the villanelle lines—something more organic please. With cream. Thank you.
Like that knot in the wood in the door of the bathroom, I too shift depending on how long I stare. But tracing the lines only brings analytical relief. I would like to excuse that part of my brain please. I’ll bring a doctor’s note if They need it.
Why, Mother, did you have Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net hanging up? One fisherman, one boy, the wild waves about to flip their boat, take them under. Did you just like the danger? The chaos of your past wasn’t enough. You needed to relive it, then cut it out. But it never worked.
I need our past like a rain-sogged blanket full of holes and smelling like dog. Because in this weather, anything will do.
I don’t remember playing. Okay, I admit to putting Barbie in the EasyBake Oven just to see what would happen, but . . . .
Somewhere outside of my mind and inside of some other organ must be a blueprint. No?
• • •
Lisa St. John is a high school English teacher currently working on a memoir. Her first chapbook, Ponderings, can be purchased at Finishing Line Press. She lives in upstate New York where she calls the Catskill Mountains home. Lisa’s poetry has been published in many journals, including the Barbaric Yawp, Bear Creek Haiku, Misfit Magazine, and Chronogram Magazine. The poem “There Must Be a Science to This” won The Poet’s Billow’s Bermuda Triangle Contest and “Mowing the Lawn” was shortlisted for the Fish Poetry Prize and later published in Fish Anthology 2016. Lisa’s blog, Random Mind Movements, can be found at http://lisastjohnblog.com.