Super-Sized Series

The Soundtrack of Our Lives

 

 
Sharon and Al Knutson

Waltzing with my Walker by Sharon Waller Knutson

Chris Stapleton sings: “You are smooth
as Tennessee Whiskey and sweet
as Strawberry Wine” to me like you did
in your cowboy hat and red shirt

with your dark hair slicked back
in Fritz’s Café while wildlife
you photographed stared
at us from the walls.

Your bearded best friend and bandmate 
batted his blue eyes at me behind
your back while the racoon tail
swung on his lead guitar.

None of us dreamed that in a decade
you’d both be dust in the desert
and I’d be waltzing with my walker
while wildlife watch through the windows.

“Go rest high on that mountain,”
Vince Gill sings. “I wish I could see 
the angels faces when they hear 
your sweet voice sing.”


Don't Think Twice It's Alright by Laurie Kuntz

Some things I will never do well:
So when you picked up your guitar,
  and asked me to sing, 
after a slight hesitation,
 unsure if the air was riddled, 
I followed you into song--
Dylan being our captain, 
certain that the chorus 
was a metaphor for our lives,
“we both gave our hearts by sacrificing a bit of our souls,”
but perhaps it is time to ignore the words,
and relish the cadence, 
the moment --
we are both carrying the tune.


Eighteen Wheeler by Judith Waller Carroll

That old song’s running through my head again,
the one whose title I can never remember

about the trucker driving through a snowstorm 
to his waiting wife and kids. 

The song that made me have to pull over
every time I heard it

those endless weeks before the birth of my son
my emotions so close to the surface 

anything would set me off.
Even now, as my brain plays a loop 

of the only lines I remember
I’m back in the Stop-N-Go parking lot

my enormous belly grazing the steering wheel
tears streaming down my cheeks 

as Mama gets the news that the Man Upstairs
was listening and Daddy is coming home

joyfully singing, “Roll on...Roll on… Roll on”  
as I pull back onto the freeway

and drive the rest of the way
to wherever it was I was going. 
 

 
Phillip and Rachael Ikins


I Want You to Stay by Rachael Ikins

“I have died every day waiting for you” Christina Perri’s song “A Thousand Years”, my twenty-something self falling into your brown eyes, steady pools over your mask, your hand’s warmth around mine before sleep.

“I have loved you for a thousand years” speaks my heart, yet how could I know this on an operating table in this OR.

A silver curl escapes the neck of your scrub suit, Hozier’s lyrics “Take me to Church” my truth, “good God, I give you my life.”  “You sharpen your knife,” and yes, “this is hungry work.”

This saving me. Your name scrawled beneath my armpit forever, where you cut, touched my heart as you removed what was damaged.

Six months later we healed, together, 
that first visit your magic pocket produced eggs, cream, butter, omelets for my empty cupboard.  Your eyes invited with Rhianna, “Stay”
“If you dare, come a little closer.” 
My refrain took up the verse,
“There’s something in the way you move,
I want you to stay.”

Now I wonder if that was real, 
some memories, visions more solid than reality, the colors, scents, lyrics singing from an iPhone not yet invented when you saved my life; records, cassettes, CDs and you, gone, 
the way my chin fit into your collarbone’s hollow, like an egg in a nest we were 
once that close.


Spring by Tamara Madison
 
Someone loans me her cassette 
of Paul Simon’s latest album. 
I listen to it as I watch snow fall 
through the pines outside the window. 
“Four in the morning/crapped out/yawning.”
 
I listen to it as I watch snow whiten the river. 
“In my little town I grew up believing”
Listen to it as the ice begins to soften
“God keeps his eye on us all.”
 
We are nearing the end. Grass and mud 
begin to show through the ski paths. 
Soon kayakers glide down the river, 
finding channels through the ice. 
“Step out the back, Jack.”
“Make a new plan, Stan.”
 
People were nice to us here. 
We didn’t mind being sequestered. 
It was a long 15 months, felt
four times as long. Decades later
my mind returns to the icy river,
the snow-bound woods,
whenever I hear these songs:
“Still crazy after all these years.”

Poet’s Note: This poem is from my upcoming collection, Russian Honeymoon, a memoir about the 15 months I spent in the USSR as a young bride. This poem is set near the end of the tour, after 15 long months of the hard work of being young Americans in the USSR, tasked by the U.S. Department of State with "telling America's story to the world."


Long Play Records by Mary Ellen Talley
Dedicated to the One I Love

Sure, we sang along with Leslie Gore’s
“Sunshine, Lollipops, and Raindrops”
but our ideal was Simon and Garfunkel’s
“Bridge Over Troubled Water,” even as we swooned
at Paul McCartney singing “All My Loving.”
Time scratched our grooves. We replaced LPs 
with cassettes we had to rewind with pencils.

James Taylor, then with full head of hair 
contemplated “Fire and Rain” but romanced us 
with “How sweet it is,” and every time I felt 
“You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman,” 
I slid Carole King’s music in the cassette slot
even though I was struggling
to be my own version of Gloria Steinem.

Mama Cass sang us into “California Dreamin’”
and the Beach Boys revved up 
“Good Vibrations.” 
Every song dove deep
into angst and joy. We knew “Don’t Worry Baby” 
meant more than just a car race 
back when scarcity of birth control
could scare the crap out of any couple.

Now new cars aren’t sold with CD players.
Our kids grew up with iPods
and I was too busy to make playlists.
Everybody’s streaming onto cell phones
while we play retro stacks of CDs.
Our son who values vinyl
knows despair is still “Blowin’ in the Wind.”

We’ve stopped buying new paraphernalia.
Our son gave us a turntable for Christmas
so we can play old vinyl 
As the stylus descends, we listen to Elvis sing
“Are You Lonesome Tonight?”
then The Righteous Brothers “Soul and Inspiration”
as we move about the living room in a slow dance.


Sweet Betsy by Joe Cottonwood

Happened in a grocery store, 
I was fondling a can labeled 
Betsy’s Sweet Peas, reminded of 
“Oh do you remember 
Sweet Betsy from Pike
Who crossed the wide prairie 
with her lover Ike”
which made me wonder if 
Ike and Betsy were, like, 
making whoopee out of wedlock
all over the wide prairie 
before finally they marry 
at the end of the song, 
a song they taught us in 
grade school for Pete’s sake 
when a stranger with infant swaddled 
to her chest blocks the Safeway aisle 
and sings soprano:
“With two yoke of oxen, 
a big yellow dog, 
A tall Shanghai rooster 
and one spotted hog.”
“Excuse me?” I say. “Was I singing? Out loud?”
“Better,” she says, “than the crap they’re playing.” 
Harmony, you know, is intimacy. Instantly.
We, strangers pushing carts. 
The baby wide-eyed, silent. 
A minute later from the next aisle 
I hear her soprano: 
“One evening quite early 
they camped on the Platte.
'Twas near by the road 
on a green shady flat.”
But she falters. Over the shelves I offer:
“Where Betsy, sore-footed, 
lay down to repose
With wonder Ike gazed 
on that Pike County rose.”
Ah, love, and the day is plenty. 
The infant wails. 



Plastic Pipeline by Lynn White

“He’s got a plastic heart, plastic teeth and toes,
plastic knees and a perfect plastic nose.
He’s got plastic lips that hide his plastic teeth and gums,”
so sang the Kinks then about their plastic man in 1969.

Now in the twenty-first century it seems he’s here
as plastic gushes everywhere
over land,
over sea
and into our very being
as plastics ingested from our food,
and inhaled in from the air we breath
become part of our bodies,
part of ourselves
to be inherited 
by our children.

We fill every hole in the ground
and soon the sea will be transformed into plastic land.
We re-cycle it by the shipload from rich places to poor,
places where the people don’t matter,
where “plastic man don’t feel no pain”.
There we dump it on the newly plasticised people 
in the plastic land we’ve created for them.

First published in Ekphrastic Review challenge for Benjamin Von Wong


A Car That Could Fly

By Joan Leotta

Domenico Modugno sold me my first car when I was twenty-seven. Although a Northern Virginia Chrysler Plymouth salesman pocketed the commission, Modugno's award winning song, Volare convinced me to buy. The rolling lyrics of this ballad about love, achieving one's dreams, and the simple freedom of dreaming one's way into the sky, were stamped on my psyche. 

I duly wrote it down my Dad’s advice but…. when the salesman showed me a blue, two door model of the car inspired by the song, the words "Nel blu dipinto di blu (in the blue sky, painted blue)" filled my brain. 

Distracted by the car's beauty, I didn’t notice any problems, bought it and named it, "Victor." At first, Victor seemed to be all I had dreamed. Then, came the problems that made me a regular at the repair bay. Worked fine there but as soon as I got home, Victor would refuse to start without ten minutes of engine warming. Victor's good nature was only paint deep.

When my job offered me a two-month assignment in Dallas Texas, I accepted with alacrity and opted to make the three-day drive. Once arrived, Victor’s starting problems continued so I took him to a Dallas Plymouth Dealer. They healed him! Together we flew along Dallas highways and explored Texas byways with nary another starting issues.

Just before Dallas assignment was finished, I sent a postcard to a guy back in DC who had laughed when I told him I’d bought a Volare. A few months after my return to DC, fall 1977, I married Joe, the laughing guy. 

Yes, a car is really nothing more than transportation from point A to point B, but there are days when I swing onto the highway in my current vehicle and gasp for joy at the  wide expanse of blue across my windshield, a sky so big that the road seems to disappear into it and I sing," Blu dipinto di blu”,  as I escape happily piu in alto, (higher) than the sun,  My everyday self disappears lassu (up there) and my dreams take over. Volare!