David Colodney

​In the 70s the TV may have been black & white but the sky was still blue
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I tell my son about black & white television & black & white photography & he thinks my whole world as a kid was black & white, drained of colour, the sky not blue but some shade of gray seen only in the analog era. He asks me if apples were black & bananas white as if to humor me when all he wants to do is grumble about the high cost of baseball cards. Between complaints about only getting 8 cards for 3 dollars, he asks how I survived without the Internet. You can do without something if you don’t know it exists, son. & video games? The cliché of playing outside until dark resurrected again. In my black & white world of no colour TV, the television was brown & the grass we played in was green, except in dry season when it turned the sepia tone of cuttlefish ink until it matched the Formica console inside. The baseball cards’ wrapper flaps in the caramel passenger seat of my red hybrid as my boy shoves pink gum in his mouth & groans at getting a second Mike Trout card when he wanted a Bryce Harper. I once needed a Tom Seaver but got duplicate Buzz Capras & Tug McGraws. Trade a Trout for a Harper with your buddies, I tell him. The economy of 9-year-old boys is measured in their own gross domestic product. Their currency is still baseball cards. The “gross” means something completely different. But the gum is the same: as if cardboard could be pink, with a taste so good lasting only a few seconds before turning into a sticky wad of nothingness reduced to a color no one wants to name.  
 
a kaleidoscope
vibe, my son blue cap pink gum 
looks like hope to me
 
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Letter to Michael Pare After Finding Streets of Fire on Hulu
 
Michael, tell me why life does this. Why I stop to notice raindrops that plop to the pavement outside the shell of the old Surf Theater & each drop sounds like a phone call from my past, faint echoes of the lost voices of FM radio deejays as their smooth growls fade to static. Of course, I stop to consider each one, try to configure their story, and mine, narrator of my own plot. And the old theatre, marquee now splashing CVS instead of the name of some Hollywood blockbuster, once hangout now metaphor. On the screen I can see you when Eddie and the Cruisers hit theaters. I was clueless, wandering like teens do, 19 and stuck in between, not child, not ripe, an unfolding libertine.  When Streets of Fire debuted the next year, I saw it here too, and was sure you shared my obsessions with Springsteen, Morrison, too, holding shadows of both in your shaman walk and Seventeen-approved hair. I guess two years on top are more than most get. Warhol dished out 15 minutes, not enough time to find a rerun of Houston Knights on Netflix. Life does this, but I don’t know why. Back to 19: it’s a bloody age. That summer a kid who graduated with me rode his motorcycle into a tree and flung slingshot until he landed on the hood of a passing car right after we’d seen The Philadelphia Experiment, a different role for you. We killed a summer here, drifting through the cigarette-smoke glossed movie screens of Saturday matinees unraveling Eddie Wilson’s mystery before drowning our futures in convenience store wine. How does anyone die at 19? Speed our Kryptonite, I guess, once invincible turned invisible. Tell me why life does this. Tell me why when Eddie and the Cruisers II: Eddie Lives! came out six years later, I’d forgotten you. Your cool side-mouth mumble still punctuated your stone-faced monotone, but Eddie was still running wild in sweaty Jersey nights, and I had a degree and a job and left bloody 19 behind like the silver slow roll of movie-ending credits. Tell me why your filmography is long, but your tally of awards is short. Tell me why life does this. Tell me why the rain seems to fall harder when the plot thickens, each drop a story with narration and action, and tell me why one day the phone stops ringing with offers. Just wondering if you could let me know and w/b/s. 


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This poem was first published at Drunk Monkeys. 

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Dark Side of the Moon

Andre and I lie on his bedroom floor, pretending to look at the sky. We’ve just seen a Pink Floyd laser show at the Miami Planetarium. It’s summer vacation and it’s hot. We still want to look at the sky but as far as we get is the popcorn ceiling acting like stars and a ceiling light wishing to be the moon. We’re in the dark so we imagine it’s cloudy and the moon is hiding. This music is so slow, I think the turntable is sad. I’ve had a whole night of Pink Floyd and I don’t need more. I don’t need more weed either, but we’re still passing a joint up-and-back between us. Please put something more up-tempo on, I’m thinking, not quite able to formulate words and there seems to be an endless stack of Floyd records queued up. I’m going to doze off and I don’t want to. If I sleep, I might dream in my father’s voice about what I’m going to do with the rest of my life. He asks me this so often I sense when every conversation builds up to it, like a simmering volcano waiting to erupt. My father’s words lava burning my teenage ears.  And yet he never seems that mad, just repetitive, and I think that’s worse. It’s like he really wants to know. The echo of his question grows louder until I realize the only sound I’m hearing now is the shuffle and scratch of the record in the runoff grooves. I look over and Andre is asleep.


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“Stacy’s Mom”

Hey, Matt, I’m not sure you remember all the details, but in our covid-free backyard with no masks we held a mini high school diploma ceremony to congratulate you for your 2020 graduation in a pandemic. I am not sure you remember when you & your mom joined me & my sons & blended a family over singing “Stacy’s Mom” with our Bluetooth speakers on Friday nights in that same backyard, bonding over Fountains of Wayne. And then, we were so proud of you, in your cap & gown in our back yard, your mom & me smiling as we worried. We hated sending you off to college in the middle of all this but, son, we could not hold you back. I remember you could not get into your dorm until you had a covid test & the university had a nurse waiting at dorm check in to swab the nostrils of each incoming freshman. I don’t need to hear the squeal you made ever again. At some point early in the pandemic Adam from Fountains of Wayne died of Covid. I never told you & I wonder if you’ll google or ask me what happened to them. It seemed we’d come full circle. But our circle never closes, son. Think of it as a horseshoe. Open at one end. Inviting love & laughter & music, somehow holding back the world’s enmity. 

**

At the Class Reunion
 
it’s nice to catch up with old friends even though we keep up on Facebook, so the questions we ask seem like follow-ups instead of the queries of the long out of touch. Sure, Michael’s addiction to Internet porn after his 50th birthday comes as the evening’s headline, but it was not totally unexpected, nor Michelle’s proclamation that she still has “blowjob lips” even without added fillers & shots. After the drinks warm us like a blanket, we talk more about who isn’t here than who is, recalling Roger & Mario & the others who got death out of the way early & the chat turns morbid until I realize the DJ is playing “Don’t Stop Believing” for what seems like the 30th time, maybe once for each year we’ve been out of high school. I walk to the cash bar & loosen my tie when I run into Sandy, who lived in my building & was rumored to have slept with every senior – except me – & she still looks like she did: strutting in an emerald form-fitting dress & has my guy friends’ mostly hairless heads spinning like tops & now she finally seems interested but all I can think of is that none of us liked Journey in high school except the cheerleaders & jocks & I didn’t hang out with any cheerleaders & jocks. I wish the guy would play Springsteen as Sandy slithers closer & I look around at the faces both lit & shadowed by a ceiling of dimmed & drab chandeliers, the lines on some of my old friends’ cheeks individual roadmaps that have lead them here to spew gibberish we don’t fully believe about the money they’ve made flipping houses & their kids getting into Stanford or Yale. Most of us just struggle try to suck in our guts & soften the gray & hide how our hands tremble slightly when we greet each other. I am glad we only do these every 10 years although at some point fate switches it to every five & we’re nearly there. At the class reunion, when the lights pop on like an interrogation, we confess we haven’t gone where we thought we would. I call an Uber & plop into the back, unable to shake the feeling that we are off a time yet timeless at the same time. I grab my phone from my pocket & begin tapping Sandy’s number, squinting to read the digits she scribbled on a damp cocktail napkin because I am not wearing my glasses. 

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This poem first appeared at Gyroscope Review.
 
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Devi, 
 
where are you when your late-night texts light up my phone like amber caution warnings? Or during those drunken calls through tears after the bars close when you ask me if you’re too rachet or if you talk too much shit as if I’m some guru, an expert on everything, yet I respond with nothing, syllables as blank as sand. You: iPhone like a mirror, painting red liquid lipstick & dabbing makeup to hide the Bangladeshi skin-tone you hate even though you’re as American as a TV commercial & me: aging dawdler, wrestler of words. I don’t care we’re of two different eras, two different worlds. I think I’m on meds now because of the ramshackle visions that tumble in my head like Tik-Toks until the next time I see you, never knowing when that will be… until I get your let’s lunch at 2 DM at 1:45(-ish) & tsunami sweat flows from my pores until it floods our Wynwood conclave of coffeehouses & boutiques. I arrive first like I always do, grab a wobbly round sidewalk table at Pink Paloma. At 3:30 you arrive smiling like the skyline but before I can say hi you proclaim you’re queer. The server arrives with our coffee & we stare at the menus like they were the terms & conditions of an Apple app update.
 
storm clouds gather steam 
telling me read the fine print
& please don’t click send
 
**
 
This poem first appeared at Gyroscope Review.

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When you’re a Springsteen song but she only listens to Dashboard Confessional
 
She strolls into your life, a summer kiss like graffiti splashed on a wishing well, the two of you always destined to battle over who says goodbye first. You believe she saved you from driving all night with no neon glow to bask you. You punch car radio buttons in the dark when no music comes in clear enough to sing along. When a Springsteen song finds you in I-95’s humidity, you wonder if she can hear it, or if she’s listening to Dashboard Confessional alone or not alone on her iPhone in an off- campus apartment too far away. Your names pound through each other’s veins like blood. You think of the nights you stare at a popcorn ceiling hoping she ambles through the door unannounced – so she can make you feel alive again, so you can feel again, her spirit as open as a highway. And she’d stand there: sunflower tattoo on her right foot, dimples like arrows on her face, knowing tomorrow she might leave you abandoned under an overpass, but who so many nights validates you with sucralose kisses even as her whispers grow fangs under lampposts, even though you know the ring she wears isn’t yours. 
 
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David Colodney is a poet living in Boynton Beach, Florida. He is author of the chapbook, Mimeograph, and his poetry has appeared in multiple journals. A two-time Pushcart nominee, David has written for the Miami Herald and the Tampa Tribune and currently serves as an associate editor of South Florida Poetry Journal.