Squeaky Jones
Joey leaves inspiration everywhere he passes. He doesn’t lose it, he oozes it, exudes inspiration like some guys waft cologne.
It’s annoying, too, because it squeaks. Kids in our school call him Squeaky. That’s the name he will use when he becomes a famous musician. Squeaky Jones
and the Field Mice. Now he’s just a kid with a garage band. I play drums. He lets me be in it because we’ve always been friends. I’m not any good. Joey
won’t make it big until after college, but then he’ll be like Michael Jackson or Bono. All the guys in our band now will become artists or scientists on account of Joey’s inspiration.
Dean will stick with Joey and be a Field Mouse. Roger will discover a talent for abstract painting, and I’ll figure out how to send messages to my past selves.
Lula at 10, Thanksgiving, 2002
Thrift store. A homemade disk of an old dog mixed with music CDs from the big band era. Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Title in sharpie. History is made of forgotten moments,
entirely unmemorable afternoons, unfamous people in a park. Dogs chase sticks. Hot dogs cook. No one ever knows. This Verbatim CD-R
would be an archaeologist’s dream if it showed a Han dynasty dog or a villa in ancient Rome, or if it surfaces again in two thousand years.
Lula, in her inadvertent immortality, is everyman’s dog. We cry and smile in fascination at a time just beyond reach, just within memory, if anyone remembered.
The Postcard
The photograph appears to be the interior
of an antique shop. Almost the entire card
is taken up–rotated ninety degrees–
by the image of an elegant gilt Victorian mirror,
marred only by a crack across its lower third,
in which can be seen thirteen
black cats–ten of them kittens–who sit or cavort beneath
a ladder. Three climb the lower steps, and one plays
off to the side in an open black umbrella with an ivory handle.
The back of the card has a green
one cent stamp with a bust of George Washington
affixed upside-down to the upper right corner
and cancelled with a simple round old-style postmark:
Las Vegas, Nevada, Feb 13, 1948. The card is addressed
neatly to Julie Harris, at an address in New York
and contains a short message to the left, written large:
Good luck to you and everyone on your upcoming production
of Macbeth. The signature is illegible.
Marc A. Drexler writes poetry in order to express with words what
words cannot express and to explore what it means to be human in an
inhumane world. He believes in the power of beauty. He has roots in
Iowa but has lived in Maryland and DC since college. He is a member
of the Earth Collective, a group of roughly 8 billion people who make
all the decisions on how we interact with our planet.