Ooh La La

Lisa Mednick-Powell

      Twenty-five years of memory can kink a lot of cable.

      —Richard Hugo 

If you haven’t been shopping,

with a migraine

in the snack foods aisle

at a brightly-lit convenience store

in a cold dead city, choosing

between salt and vinegar chips,

or cayenne-flavored crackers shaped like tiny fish,

you wouldn’t notice 

Rod Stewart’s voice cutting

through the knife-dappled haze

of your pain and nausea:

I wish that I knew what I know now

when I was younger

I wish that I knew what I know now

when I was stronger…

Ronnie Lane’s opus.  And if  

you hadn’t played B-3

on one of Ronnie’s last songs

and afterwards he’d called you saying,

Dahling you played wonderfully on my

song…millions of

people will hear it!

—and you knew it was a soft little lie,

because everyone knew he was dying,

then  

tears wouldn’t jump up

inside you like the devil

as you fingered the foil bags

of the cheaper brands, comparing

fat, calories, prices,

the consumptive cost of killing pain,

thinking about milligrams of

vitamin B6 in the chips versus

the salt content of the crackers shaped like

tiny fish.

(And you might 

not remember  

reading about how

barrels of salt cod used to feed

slaves in places much hotter than this,

the practicalities

of salting fish and packing them

in barrels: the incongruity

of using salt to kill

pain. You might choose the potato chips, or

you might

choose the fish.)

And you wouldn’t own

the memory

of singing  

in the basement

of a weathered gray house

perched high above the Colorado

River.

(the one in Texas

they dammed to make

the lake where recreational sailors

drink, entangled

in flora, docked at the rotten

boathouse bar where you played

Up Against the Wall Redneck

Mothers, or maybe

London Homesick Blues night after

night for empire-building drunks who

would rather hear 

Margaritaville.)

And, absent the mitigation of

memory and mirage,

you wouldn’t wonder: what if

you had known then what

you know now, what if

you’d cracked the pearlescent spell

of smoke and stage lights, if you had

(In the one same morning that belongs to all the different nights)

woken up rude, to discover

that keeping it real

was just too damned expensive,

would you have

cut the cables?

Lisa Mednick-Powell is a recovering songwriter and musician who writes poems and essays when she has time between teaching gigs. She has produced two albums oforiginal words and music and might start spitting out songs again if she gets the spirit. The music has taken her all over the map, from New Orleans to Texas to Dublin and beyond. She holds a Master’s degree in English.