Introducing a new series of poems by Julian Matthews. Julian is a writer and Pushcart-nominated poet published in The American Journal of Poetry, Autumn Sky Poetry Daily, Borderless Journal, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Dream Catcher Magazine, Live Encounters Magazine, Lothlorien Poetry Journal and The New Verse News, among others. He is a mixed-race minority from Malaysia and lived in Ipoh for seven years. Currently based in Petaling Jaya, he is a media trainer and consultant for senior management of multinationals on Effective Media Relations, Social Media and Crisis Communications. He was formerly a journalist with The Star and Nikkei Business Publications Inc
Link: https://linktr.ee/julianmatthews
By Julian Matthews
She taught me the alphabet at home in penciled drawings.
The A was the Eiffel tower, like the keychain souvenir she gifted
me from her tour of Paris.
The B was a butterfly wing, the J, an umbrella handle,
the O, a tortoise, the S, a snake, the U, a magnet.
We eventually drifted, the years pulling us apart.
Time flitted and floated away in the wind.
Unsaid words betrayed us, shed their skins
and crept away – the letters that never got sent.
We crawl now, wrinkled necks poking
out from shells, to text message:
Are you well?
When I got to Paris as an adult,
with my adult son after the Camino walk,
to finally see it, the long lines put us off
and we chose not to climb it.
Instead, we lay on the grass and unpacked our sandwiches
as the trinket-sellers waved tiny replicas in our faces.
They reminded me of the A’s I drew as a child.
The real one looming now in the midday sun.
I turned to him, trying to recall when or how I taught him
the alphabet and whether any left an imprint as large
as the tower in front of us.
But the only A’s that came to mind are that of the recovering
Alcoholic and the recovering Addict; two A’s we left behind.
Two pilgrims now bonding over a meal, squinting under a cloudless
Parisian sky, without any shades nor umbrellas.
I watched as he looked up and chewed,
his mouth curled up in a big C lying on its back,
and my heart turning into two B’s
winging in the air.
First published in Lit Shark Magazine, Issue 9, based in Europe, and available on Amazon at https://a.co/d/8tMkMET
