The flip side           when

Everything is a film        and the

Kodak squares overlap

Sunlight

                 on railing legs

and you cross the road without pressing the button

*pause   breath   birds   wind   cars*

light headed head y d a z e w h e n th ereflectionsinthe w a terfeelmorerealthanyourfeett

-appingonthetarmac

The sounds ripping through 

you like brake lights in the

sublime 

a post fact post haste defacto post box

*pause   train passes*

The sea is yours

as you find it––outside the train window

and you cant tell the difference between the wind and your fingertips

*breath*

The Flipside seems familiar

        A longlost land they said was greener

*breath*

In the event, you have crawled through

       strutted out

                                  hips swinging        shorts-too-short-re

-calls a kind of panic           

                                            BURNING

                               From the train window and the arm 

digs into my back                                                                                                

but

you are on The

Flipside now &

mainly you are

Joyful

and you cant remember why you were stressed or what

Anxiety feels like and               yet you are suddenly aware

of how high functioning you have become

*level crossing beeps*

                                               And you crave music

                                               All you hear is leaves 

                                               And playground conversations as you get lost again—again 

(andagain andag a i nandagain)

winding steps transporting you across oceans to

a summer long gone   

another Flipside

another turntable

*car*

                  “my mind attempts to work in binaries”

––but my senses form a spectrum

And I cant fit my thoughts into stanzas

but I was raised

 

on the poems my mother taught me 

The flipside means perfume that’s not quite right 

*car*

*birds   breath*

it means a friendship you don’t understand

and a change to a constant you thought you’d relied on

*BREATH*

but was in fact driving you mad

                                                                                   I haven’t reached The Flipside                                                                           yet.

                                                                    I dream about it at night in 

                                                                                                           a surrealist stress dreams

*breath—*

Where I’m lost in a david bowie music video 

and I can’t remember the boundaries

where I put my

Kodak film.

*car   breath   birds   train   breath   birds   car   train*

So instead I  keep walking

And walking

And walking

And 

 

So one day                             I’ll charge

my headphones

                   and rejoin the world.

 

Words by Evelyn Grace Fairclough-Kay. Art by Cindy Liu.