Three Poems by Zak Wardell

 

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.