Solar Festival

 

Where the exhaustion drops our dark eyes
Dry into the dim soil--a last sunward glimpse
Before green sleep cracks our lids in a dream
Of water gnawing soil, curling around us, chewing--
In that field we are all listening to the sun,
Singing.
In the far forest fringe, mowed to a double row
Trees sigh in the last festival night, birth of Autumn
Whose eyes are dark, as all our dreams are green
Beyond these webs and whispers and wings
Swept by the last hot sight.

It took time...and another poem...and then another chapbook of poetry...to bring my head back to the space where these prompts tap into the fantastic rather than the furious. Fury is a great activator--but there's so much it's just shutting me down. I go back to fantasy for my sense of cycles, for rage against despair, for breathing space. And, of course, to re-enchant an exhausted field, frazzled in too much sunlight, too much heat, too many oops-I-forgot-to-water days (I'm sure that doesn't happen on farms. It happens in my backyard, though.). 

Also, I may be a little cranky because I've been spending the past few days re-doing my writing files and there's nothing like a project full of labels, lists, and stacks of printouts from 2012 to seduce you into thinking about all the lovely order and neatness that will result and forgetting the days of quibbling over exactly what should be filed where and why while the dogs eel their way through stacks. 

Hope your writing week has been productive & that everyone is staying safe & sane. 

-- Chrissa

Once Upon a Breeze

 

Prologue

I waited for the tornado beside the green tomatoes

My back to the warm bricks, palms in the dirt, heels in the grass.

The clouds came, the thunder stumbled over me, and then

My grandmother came to make me go inside, to clean up.

Tiny tornadoes had taken the tomatoes the year before;

All this storm did was rain and steam.

Chapter 1

Years later, I am sitting on a Starbucks porch,

Watching the swift traffic, feeling even more exposed,

When I hear a girl running rhymes and calls,

Dropping feathers and lecturing the grackles on kindness.

It’s a group noun for fairies, she says.

Then she winks at me.

Tornadoes are sloppy, she tells them.

Houses are good disguises, though, beach houses especially.

I buy out the muffin plate and leave pastries on my table.

I hear her laughing as I leave.

Chapter 2

I grew up just far enough from the beach

That my parents had an excuse.

It’s like the start of a novel, but there’s nothing new

About parental excuses.

You’ve got to learn somewhere.

I drive down to visit, stay for lunch.

Make a good excuse. Drive to the beach.

It’s a hot afternoon and the birds are loud.

I remember snacks--technically, my leftovers.

A seagull trades a few fries for a tip about a light house,

An empty house. For the rest of my sandwich, he flew me away.

Chapter 3

Add caption

Our house snagged on the edge of Crown Shell City;

Fell on one of the low rims, beside smooth walls, 

Shining like a Greek city in a faded photo, 

And I’m working up my courage to go outside.

To meet my neighbors in the lavender twilight.

Abandon

 Word choice is half 

silence

Truth is lemon clean, rosemary thick.

You should smell pruning, not composting.

In my excised leaves

I was worried I'd find something sharp;

I was dull.

Draft stacks tremble before the fan, 

words making worm cast tunnels

between scarred, folder-coffined pages 

cement-thick,

scentless.

You Need to Go

 You need to get out of the house, they said

When I explained that my college Shakespeare had started ticking.

I bumped the desk--we're excavating our lives

Because the unending and impossible twist of infinite quarantine

Renders our home itself an Escher of no-place.

Every souvenir book and towel, every blanket and knick-knack

Is thankful to not be buried under summer

Shopping. They discovered the world while he wrote those plays

And we're supposed to buy it, piecemeal.

Possession's the heat that anneals broken pieces swept together,

Plastic jerked like gear in a child's car, 

Sets it loose, running across the land. Water? Fire? Who cares!

As long it gives lift. You need to go,

They said. Rev the engine. Leave the house. Wear a mask.

Greetings fellow beMused. :) I love the image Carrie provided but my brain is deep, deep in the re-orderings of books and paperwork and things that were going to be used for decorating a booth at the local author fair (rescheduled, perhaps cancelled) and whether there will be room, if the hurricanes playing tag in the Gulf decide to head for the city where my parents live, for a few additional air mattresses or sleeping bags wedged in between tottering stacks of What the Ever-Loving Heck, 2020? My spouse says he's glad that I instigated this mess because it keeps him distracted (by wondering where all the new bruises and scrapes came from? by the book he read when he was ten and is just going to glance through...just for a minute? by being annoyed at me for being on the computer while he's corralling calving stacks of books?) and that helps. By the way, who picked an eye over Texas the week before a hurricane? As a Gen-Xer, I'm contractually bound to applaud the irony. 

Sharing with The Sunday Muse & Poets & Storytellers United. :)

-- Chrissa

WordCrafters Wednesday Prompt

 

What Would the Moon Say, If It Could Speak?

I was the hollowed heart and I was the skull of the sky.

I laid the mist and pulled the memory of water, like a blanket,

From the dissolute dreams lying like oil on the eternal road.

But I was never one to conjure myself out of the darkness.

The sun did that; silvered the scars, smoothed the hollows.

I was the revenant city when you first saw my true face.

I was a man. I was a woman. An eye. A hare. A coin.

I . . . I forgot the question. Darkness carves me thin.