Window Shopping/Conjuration

Doors slide away, pulling the dust and heat aside
Step through onto concrete polished by sole and mop
Gleaming under the lights, where the fruit tilts
Toward the sheen. Remember the way it felt, smell it now--
Magic is the place where you don't live.

There are overhangs, deep shadows over smooth concrete
That chips into sharp, stony fluff, like a bitten candy bar
On the corner, where the steps lead down to asphalt
Somewhere you've only been once.

Sun, heat, puddles; the swift shade deep behind you.
Turn back to the window, to all the homeless things
While the heat catches your arms and ankles
Breaths chasing you to the car, to the heavy heat
In the backseat, before it blows over you.

And everything moves, all the things you've carried
Sloshing across the backseat. You'll be home in a few days.

It's the leaving, the heat and the air, the bright lights,
The heavy light, the shadows and the still shade
When you're young enough to parse each separately
Before the blur that becomes errands erodes you.

Magic is the sour surface gleaming like a rainbow,
the puddle that gives you the town in pieces of sky.

Magic conjures the sadness that must be slaked
By neatness, by things properly placed.

Magic is released in the sweep of the doors,
In the smell of the antiseptic difference down the road.

Doors slide away. Buy a spirit for everything that waits.

This week's posting schedule is a little different for me. With the beginning of the summer version of NaNo (I'm already behind...) and a holiday week, I decided to try to get in several poems regarding formative places. Probably because of the holiday, I'm caught up in thinking about vacations from back when I was young. The way I was fascinated by mundane differences, like not-my-grocery-store. The tiny coke bottles where my grandmother had her hair done. The possibility of going to dinner with my cousins and standing in the tile entryway of the old Luby's, waiting for the line to move. Tuna noodle salad in a white ceramic bowl. This isn't really what was intended by the prompt (which mentioned historic markers and wasn't really meant for a writing exercise, anyway) but it's the way I took it. And so, poems about memory (and magic) through the 4th.

-- Chrissa