Connie Johnson

Call Me Your Jazz Epicenter

Swallowed gulp of Billie Holiday
Side order of Esther Phillips
A  pivotal question:

Is you is or
is you ain’t my baby?

Tethered to an underworld
You are my high-hat of happiness
An inevitable handful of stars

In the unpredictable beauty that you bring to me
Can I thrill you again and again and again?

In a day that calls for applause
We are black cat aplomb
Reminders of blood and bone

You reside inside of me
Like secrets and dreams

I look at you and wonder
What are you thinking?

Impeccable timing and the warmth
Of your skin / all assumptions are ghostly
Amidst this scattered applause 

I am a pyramid of love in a Jazz
Epicenter  / I want to stand at the mic
And share every secret that comes
To my head

 

Vinyl Spins: Haiku

O my sweet vinyl
stacks upon stacks upon stacks
music connoisseur!

a Jimi Hendrix
bit of psychedelia
always Bold As Love

phonograph needle
“skip to the best part, won’t ya?!”
Prince’s Purple Rain

Amy Winehouse’s
solitude sounds like the blues
Tears Dry On Their Own

Betty Carter swings
hieroglyphics of bebop
jazz in full effect

Brubeck memories
of gray-lit San Francisco
when we’d all Take 5

Impressionistic
Bill Evans is a classic
Nardis transports me

jazz barometer
how do you spell freedom?
only the soul knows

it’s Johnny Hartman --
transfix me at 3am!
you make time stand still

Thelonious Monk
your inscrutability
is Straight no Chaser

trade my old vinyl
reacquaint me with greatness
Miles, come home with me!

 

Connie Johnson is a Los Angeles, CA-based writer whose poetry has appeared in San Pedro River Review, Syncopation Literary Journal, Cholla Needles, Misfit Magazine, Haight-Ashbury Literary Journal, The Rye Whiskey Review, Sports Literate, and Writing in a Woman’s Voice. Everything is Distant Now (Blue Horse Press), her debut poetry collection, is available on Amazon; In a Place of Dreams, her digital album/chapbook, can be found at www.jerryjazzmusician.com