Clever Magazine, Vol. 6, #3 " Traffic Control " (www.clevermag.com)

Wanna read the latest from Clever Magazine?
Click here and return to the coverpage!

TRAFFIC CONTROL

by Yvonne Chism-Peace

Bird adjusted his rearview mirror, a tiny periscope sprouting just above his left ear. Not that he could see much yet behind his fogged-up goggles— What was that overhead? WYSLOP’s kamikaze traffic helicopter? A flock of gulls on their way to KFC down the block?

Bird fiddled with the hidden volume button on his right ear muff. Drat! Slipped in the wrong micro CD this morning. “Maine Loon Calls at Twilight” instead of “Dixie” by the Elfreth’s Alley Mummers.

Just then a biker whizzed by, his long hair billowing like the black sails of Theseus. Bird swallowed his lump of envy and patted his sleek new helmet, emerald green in honor of his hometown football team. He despised the sport. But who needs passive-aggressive? Not Bird. His “Go With the Flow” motto emblazoned on the back of his black satin Puff Daddy jacket.

Testing for foul weather, Bird nudged his nose guard into the wind, like a vintage Edsel easing past Amtrak blinkers. Did he detect indications of pot wafting from the foreclosed property next door? No. More like testosterone and sweat. Bird eased back into parking position. Better give the community college multi-gender track team— all fifty of them— the right of way.

Bird sucked in his gut, not yet firm as a skateboard, more like a deflated birthday balloon. Underneath his twenty-first century samurai sneakers, self-made woolen knee socks, catalog long-johns, Vietnam camouflage-patterned sweat suit, hockey knee pads and chin guard, Muhammad Ali boxing mittens, underneath all this subterfuge— Bird was simply sixty-five.

One week retired, footloose, but not yet out on a limb, Bird was simply beginning his new morning energizer: a casual, no-nonsense, two-mile jog. A tiptoe here, a side-step there along his neighborhood sidewalk. Not over the hill.

When his left ear muff bleated the “All Clear” signal, Bird stepped into his future, like Neal Armstrong, exercising what the nineteenth century had called a man’s daily “constitution”—

Look out! Bird!

Too late.

Sideswiped by a motorized wheelchair... into the path of a jaywalking pigeon.

The poet Yvonne writes short fiction under the name Yvonne Chism-Peace. In 2003 she won the Leeway Award for Emerging Writers (Fiction). In 2002-03 these ezines published her stories: Muse Apprentice Guild, Melic Review, Wired Hearts, The3rdegree, Tattoo Highway, Pindeldyboz, Moxie, ken* again, Inkburns, Word Riot, Clever Magazine, Moondance, Feminista, and In Posse Review.

Her books of poetry are IWILLA SOIL, IWILLA SCOURGE, and IWILLA RISE (Chameleon Productions Inc. 1985, 1986, 1999) for which she won NEA fellowships. She was the poetry editor at MS. magazine (1974-1987).