By: Patrick Meeds

—For Amy Dickinson

Featured art: Jacques and Berthe Lipchitz by Amedeo Modigliani

                                     You be a rubber bullet, and I’ll be fireworks
on TV. You dismantle your prejudices, and I’ll acquaint myself
with all the latest fads. You drag the river, I’ll manage expectations.
You shake your head and say yes, I’ll nod my head and say no.
I’ll call you Texas, and you can call me Nancy.

                                                                 Practical and precise, we
will compile a list of things we will need. Warm clothes
and synchronized watches. Miniature technology and hand-drawn
maps. Invisible ink and antique stationery. The music of Django
Reinhardt and a list of all the patron saints.

                                                                                    Things we will avoid?
Strict adherence to dogma and barbed-wire fences. Left-handed
compliments and uncomfortable shoes. Complex algorithms
and attempts at perpetual motion. Sing-alongs and potluck suppers.

                                                                   We will travel by train under
assumed identities and ride facing backwards. We will explain
ourselves to no one. Let’s be clear about one thing, reinvention
is the key. Look, there’s an abandoned car with a tree growing
through it. There’s an old bathtub with flowers planted in it.
There’s a fence made of old bicycle frames. There’s a car with an
antenna fashioned from an old coat hanger. These things were
one thing, now they are another.

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Patrick Meeds has lived in Syracuse his whole life and works in the textbook department of the Syracuse University bookstore. He has previously been pub- lished in Bohemian Pupil Press’s Dead Flowers, A Poetry Rag, and Stone Canoe. In his free time he enjoys playing the guitar and studies writing at the Syracuse YMCA Downtown Writer’s Center.