Double A sides
Two singles conjoined
on the Beatles record.
Childhood recollections
Very Strange
Ruminations of dream
Nothing is Real
Penny Lane is in my ears and in my eyes
St. Paul pictured
a jovial street,
a suburban scene
with barbers and firemen,
bankers driving motorcars,
clean machines.
Let me take you down
St. John’s somnambulant
orchard tour walked
on both sides of ground,
solitary trees drinking
from sleepy roots.
Living is easy with eyes closed.
My father’s Beatles myth
became mine. He did not impart
many words but shared
his sacrament of songs.
I entered his sonic church,
built on vinyl discs
and Rolling Stone.
Bogeymen
Lawnmowers and chainsaws
stir the honeysuckle
fence line.
Last summer a man was yelling
through the trees, now lonely
canines echo through.
Old dogs howl
in semi-conversant
tones about death and taxes,
and the perfect lawn.
This time I join in
with the barking.
Singing and sawing
about domestic disrepair,
and ravages of spring’s gale winds
My anaemic mental hygiene
gives way to wilder hedges,
dishevelled lawn.
Ivy grows stranger every day,
a bellwether to the world
of my unkempt brain.
1981 Space Odyssey
Freeze dried meatloaf
and mashed potatoes
weigh our plates.
My grandmother measures
doses of water for the
instant gravy.
We're admonished
for hand held calculator
hazards and snowball brain
Freeze. A tale is told about old
Biddle Street, where the grocer
added figures, pencil to paper bag.
Grease from internal combustion
engines bookmarks a schoolbook
on dinosaurs, as my grandfather
points to pages of levelled trees,
explains his labours in the CCC,
blasting rock for highways.
My brother and I have been
looking down avenues
and streets on the Monopoly
board. We are abandoning
Parker Brother game pieces
for Atari pong blips.
Thick with coats, a closet
tucks away hallway light,
where generations of games
Scatter. We exit the escape hatch,
My mother’s shuttle docks with
the curb. Keys jangle. We gather
our bags and radiation suits
for the journey home.
and space walk to the car.
Zak Wardell majored in physics and earned a
minor in creative writing at UMBC. He left his hometown of Baltimore in 1995 to
attend graduate school at the University of Missouri in Columbia. He received a
Ph.D. in physics in 2003. His scientific papers can be found in the Monthly
Notices of the Royal Academy of Sciences. His poetry has been published in
six volumes of Interpretations, a project of the Columbia Art League,
and in the Loch Raven Review.
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