Fuzzy, romantic feelings (in cars)
I don’t have a womb-like car anymore.
Back then, I saw the world from cinema-like windows
as the storms fell fast. Music played on the radio
an ‘80s dream soundtrack, giving off
fuzzy, romantic feelings. My eyes stayed open,
my heart pained as if I were 16 again.
The street full of rain is still there,
but most of the cars have disappeared.
The rain now extinguishes younger fires.
I traveled long & settled down thousands of miles away,
exchanging my old car for money & freedom.
The movie & music changed overnight.
I now walk in the elements;
a hired driver sometimes picks me up,
but the fuzzy, romantic feelings from the radio
still haunt me. I go back to Square 1,
remembering the girl with her own car,
longing for freedom.
©2020 Carrie Magness Radna All rights reserved.
Born in Norman, Oklahoma, Carrie Magness Radna is an audiovisual cataloger at the New York Public Library, a singer, a lyricist-songwriter, and a poet who loves to travel. Her poems have previously appeared in the Oracular Tree, Tuck Magazine, Muddy River Poetry Review, First Literary Review-East, Mediterranean Poetry, Shot Glass Journal and The Poetic Bond VIII, and will be published in Nomad’s Choir, Polarity E-Magazine and Cosmographia’s “The spirit, it travels: an anthology of transcendent poetry” (July 2019). She won 12th prize of the 2018 Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards for “Lily (no. 48 of Women’s names sensual series),” and 3rd prize for “The tunnel” (category: Words on the Wall: All-Genre Prompt) at the 69th annual Philadelphia Writers’ Conference (2017). Her first chapbook, Conversations with dead composers at Carnegie Hall (Flutter Press) was published in January 2019, and Remembering you as I go walking (Boxwood Star Press) was published on August 23, 2019. Her latest poetry collection, Hurricanes never apologize, was published by Luchador Press in December 2019. She lives with her husband Rudolf in Manhattan.
Cajun Mutt Press 