​Across This Planet of Crossings

by Andreas Fleps

At a restaurant, I overheard a man tell his date, "I'm overwhelmed on all sides, even my hairline is shouting fall back!" Amused, she replied, "The problem is a person can only retreat as far as themselves."

Sitting on a bench in an otherwise empty park, I listened to a grandma tell her granddaughter, “Look, honey, sometimes we have to breathe for each other. It’s the cost of sharing air when there are hordes of laboring lungs."

A person once whispered to me, "Some are born with the Mariana Trench inside them.”

A friend disclosed to me that at her first therapy session, when asked how she felt, she concluded, “I don’t know. I’m often not on speaking terms with myself."

One middle-aged man described his love life to me as Cupid’s arrow missing him by a lifetime.

Another guy with fried nerves and IBS told me he felt like a fart — hardly even here, yet capable of stinking up a room.

I asked my mother, “Can my story get better?” And she said, “Yes, because your tale isn’t wrung dry of verbs just yet.”

When I asked an older woman what she wished her younger self would've known, she replied, "You try to shove the world away, only to find yourself tumbling back into its arms."
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I heard a kid say, "My mind is like a coloring book, but my thoughts only have one color."

A brother with lifelong depression admitted to me, “I feel like I'm lying half-dead on the perilous road of my own body. I’m the beaten man and the robber, the priest and the Levite, but not the Samaritan, considering there’s no good in me.” 

A little girl told me she knew a ghost that added more holes to its sheet to see less of itself.

A failed artist revealed to me, "Most nights, I sit and listen to my pulse’s quiet round of applause."

When I asked what aging feels like, an Irish nun responded, "Being stitched out of an incomprehensible tapestry."

An Uber driver told me, for words of wisdom, a dying man chose, "Grief paints the world we thought we had already framed."

I asked my Opa, "Do we have souls?” His face fumbled with a smile, then a frown. He replied, "I think so. We see their reflections in the state of our world.”

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Andreas Fleps is a poet/writer based in the suburbs of Chicago. He studied theology and philosophy at Dominican University, and his debut collection of poems entitled Well into the Night (via Energion Publications) was released at the end of 2020. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in publications such as Marathon Literary Review, The Rappahannock Review, Waxing & Waning, The Razor, and the award-winning anthology Glissando!, among others. He translates teardrops.

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