Three Poems
by Bryana Fern
Surround sound
It wasn’t like the soft beginning
of a film where the lights fade
away and you’re safe in that moment
from everything outside waiting for you.
Stuffy theater, the one on W 2 St., its
AC always down. Nylon chairs torn
And stained since we were in high school
Band. But it wasn’t like that hot air.
Like the first brightening scene
on the screen illuminating heads
and empty seats and cell phones
still in use. It wasn’t like that.
It wasn’t like the gentle intro
of our main character in their
miniscule village on the edge
of impossibility and regret.
The reach for popcorn and rest your
Arm behind my chair routine. Dumb
Familiarity disguised as affection.
Heat burrowing in my stomach anyway.
The soft, soft orchestra clear
in Dolby surround speakers.
The shadows on your face when a
Scene turns bright and revealing.
It wasn’t like that at all.
You erupted into my world
and drowned out my patience. Y
ou crushed me with a burst of ice
and moved on to the next theater.
The film ended before I thawed.
Damascus road tours
What are the troubles I try to leave behind? The troubles
I end up running into again, like a cat in a maze rounding
a corner to slam into a mirror of rotting green shrubs...
and me. Why do I keep turning the car around on exits
then looping back once more? 91. Then 89. Then on to
133 before it happens again, the bluetooth phone map
revolving “route recalculation”s like a rubbed cassette?
I’ve turned off the volume, but I still hear it: “Exit
the highway, then turn right and make a U-turn.”
The poorly labeled boxes shift in the back of my Subaru.
One has popped open, fake plants sticking beyond the lid
scribbled, BOOKS, because I only had scotch office tape
and was too stubborn to go buy packing tape from Dollar
General. The real plants, resigned to death, sit in pots in
an empty apartment, scattered in spots around the bare
living room as an offering to the landlord for all the holes
in the wall from movie posters. All rolled together in five
rubber bands, they jettisoned to the back when I brake-
slammed in Atlanta again because I-75 doesn’t know how
to be. Stuck and waiting with my troubles, each one
catching up like distracted lion cubs finally reaching
their mother. “Let’s go, then,” I say.
I pass billboards of all kinds on the horrid route to
the coast through Georgia. Nothing for 290 miles
but flat land, empty towns, and messages of
abortionists in hell glaring down at me from on
High. “Do you know where you’re going? Call
1-800-GOD-TRUTH.” I adjust my Walmart aviators
with Audrey Hepburn flair and speed on, teeth
grinding the way they do at night. My nightguard
is in the box labeled, KITCHEN. Probably. At the
Waffle House near Live Oak, a child sticks out
his blueberry syrup tongue. And I do it back.
pancakes and grits and troubles strong in the air
Fort Myers in August
I find an essay prompt today
In an old folded craft book, the
Pages alternating from creased
And yellow like a dried gingko leaf
To somehow still crisp, clear.
“I can’t remember” is how I’m
Supposed to begin each line.
Immediate melancholia strikes.
An instant groan like an old oak
Bending in the hurricane, survived
It all to be snapped in bulldozer teeth
During clean up. No replacement ever
Planted. Mass insertion of palmetto
Scrubs instead. A safer boundary between
Lots. But I died high up in that oak’s arms when
You turned me away, left us with mom. That
‘92 Flamebird shredding the dirt drive.
If you want me to not recall [insert
Vague emotional event], then I’ll have to
Not be. I am not blessed with a mind
That sheds undesirable memories like
Pine needles, like holes in a sail, ripped.
I am not cursed with the inability to
Preserve thoughts and triggers on a shelf
In a basement beside the canned peaches,
Void of life and light. We don’t have
Basements in Florida. And so I
Cannot express what I don’t remember.
Not even those things that never happened.
I am a vault in the sand with no key.
BIO: Dr. Bryana Fern earned her PhD in Creative Writing from the Center for Writers at The University of Southern Mississippi. Her work has been published in Sequestrum, Sou’wester, Harpur Palate, Red Mud Review, Entropy, Redactions, Whispering Prairie Press, Rappahannock Review, Rock & Sling, and Washington Independent Review of Books. She has presented at national conferences on creative writing pedagogy, Tolkien Studies, and narrative theory. She has also published critical articles on Star Trek and feminism, including a chapter in McFarland’s Space, the Feminist Frontier.