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Common Magic | Poetry In Voice

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Your best friend falls in love and her brain turns to water. You can watch her lips move, making the customary sounds but you can see they’re merely words, flimsy as bubbles rising from some golden sea where she swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid. It’s always like that. You stop for lunch in a crowded restaurant and the waitress floats toward you. You can tell she doesn’t care whether you have the baked or french-fried and you wonder if your voice comes in bubbles too. It’s not just women either. Or love for that matter. The old man across from you on the bus holds a young child on his knee; he is singing to her and his voice is a small boy turning somersaults in the green country of his blood. It’s only when the driver calls his stop that he emerges into this puzzle of brick and tiny hedges. Only then you notice his shaking hands, his need of the child to guide him home. All over the city you move in your own seasons through the seasons of others: old women, faces clawed by weather you can’t feel clack dry tongues at passersby while adolescents seethe in their glassy atmospheres of anger. In parks, the children are alien life-forms, rooted in the galaxies they’ve grown through to get here. Their games weave the interface and their laughter tickles that part of your brain where smells are hidden and the nuzzling textures of things. It’s a wonder that anything gets done at all: a mechanic flails at the muffler of your car through whatever storm he’s trapped inside and the mailman stares at numbers from the haze of a distant summer. Yet somehow letters arrive and buses remember their routes. Banks balance. Mangoes ripen on the supermarket shelves. Everyone manages. You gulp the thin air of this planet as if it were the only one you knew. Even the earth you’re standing on seems solid enough. It’s always the chance word, unthinking gesture that unlocks the face before you. Reveals the intricate countries deep within the eyes. The hidden lives, like sudden miracles, that breathe there.

This poem is NOT ELIGIBLE FOR THIS YEAR'S CONTESTS because it was recited at last year's National Finals. Bronwen Wallace Your best friend falls in love and her brain turns to water. You can watch her lips move, making the customary sounds but you can see they’re merely words, flimsy as bubbles rising from some golden sea where she swims sleek and exotic as a mermaid. It’s always like that. You stop for lunch in a crowded restaurant and the waitress floats toward you. You can tell she doesn’t care whether you have the baked or french-fried and you wonder if your voice comes in bubbles too. It’

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