Then The Planchette

 We come to the narrow entrance--

no wider 

than a driveway--

where the signs perch.

We turn.

A narrow lane,

signs continuing

against 

a bright curve of landscaping.

A flag snaps blue, red, white,

deep in the grass.

Then the wooden house.

The masking.

The silence.

Our tented privacy.

Then, the planchette.

The ritual summoning.

If the question is what is haunting you this week, the answer is the idea that we choose to summon violence. Also, pickup flags in the absence of official parades annoy me.

-- Chrissa

Church of the Shark

 

Today's WordCrafter prompt is futuristic, with the suggestion of a poem/story/etc. taking place in the year 2051. Carrie has picked out a cool image--I love the domes, the suggestion of traffic, the warm tones, the potential trees in the near distance. It makes me think of college, of museums, of the way the world used to look when the future might be shinier than right now. It's the promise that we'll clean it up as we go, like kids picking up their rooms before leaving for vacation or before going to sleep. While these towers and moons calm me, the poem that speeds through is not...exactly...the promise of a fantastic future in a place where red and orange are the colors of a healthy environment. Just out of curiosity--would that be nerve-wracking for someone who grew up on a relatively blue planet? Instead, here is

Church of the Shark

Coming out of the blue was accidental.

Land is a lagniappe to sentience, an excuse

to form the ocean in the utter deep.

We have contravened the cetacean, 

the oceanic, the order of the thermocline,

the dissolve of the light.

We give up the same verse since 2045,

when the Sharks came for art;

came for our dry imaginations.

They stayed to teach us the prayer for forgiveness.

We have withered dry; we breathe greedily--

forgive us, our ocean. Come back to us.

And they have.

The sharks say it is just. 

Land is a perilous privilege. We take a breath,

blow the prayers upward.

They rise like an unstable memory

of glass and height all the way

to the edge of the sky.

-- Chrissa

All the Reefs in the Mall

 

I've given the shadows fins and filled the tiles with a hose

I found curled behind that door. I stole the moss from an oak

in the parking lot. I tripped over the asphalt;

there could have been a mini-sward, a puddle lawn of grass

back in the day, before the stores closed and the cars left.

There's just a dark dip and furrow and a thick trunk;

shadows crumble, here, too. 

I heard the cars swishing by, beyond the remains of the theater.

I watched movies in that theater. I stood in the lobby with friends.

I remember the yellow carpet. I remember the rectangle cut doorways,

the posters, the bathrooms, the impatience, the darkness.

This place shouldn't have carpet. 

I pulled it up. I scraped it off with a shovel--who left

a shovel leaning against an inner wall? 

Kids played here. They could have been hurt--

maybe the carpet helped. 

We didn't need carpet, though. 

We needed tiles, like a path through the lights.

I don't know where the fish came from.

I think...there used to be a pet store.

And an import store. Someone must have

poured them from a ceramic stool, from a woven basket,

from a broken wish, from a kiss that never happened.

I hung the moss while I waited for the dragonflies

among the canlights, spots dropped brilliant

across the backs of fish, like silver someone dropped,

like the polish and tin and sugar glaze

not ever dimming under the glass banks

like fish in a reef, all the trinkets in a mall.

I'm waiting for the dragonflies.

I'll hear the tink of their nails against the edges

of the tiles as yet undrowned.

I should have pulled up more carpet.

Let's Cartoon the Blacktop/Saturday Morning Special

 

Let's Cartoon the Blacktop/Saturday Morning Special

Watch the edges--they're the real things.

See those stacks of cargo containers?

The ones with the scratch-gleam electricity monster

cute, fluffy, and growling for his supper

through the maze of that yard?

Someone dumps old cargo out of mind, not sight.

Power towers stalk our ley lines of modernity 

to cast us on Saturdays, once at a time.

This primary brightness  dreams cityscape,

quarantined to the six feet between you and the tv.

No trip was ever real. Can you see it on your skin? 

Diagram the old-school maps, color in the route 

along freckles and wrinkles--there

 will never be a Stuckey's or a Holiday Inn

or a swimming pool or a color found only in projection.

 Sun depilates the skin to reveal the car window.

Cows in the distance, last dip before the next town,

the great stores arrayed in racks and shelves and ceilings;

you stay hungry as a villain for cartoon food

among treasures stuffed and fluffy...

Like the monster climbing the empty containers,

Like the rounded hole where the film melts into the light.

Let's cartoon the blacktop; no trip is ever real.

No loop is ever done.

Inspired by this week's brilliant Sunday Muse pic (above) and the incoming cool front. :) I've been in a mood to pick through different kinds of projects, to thumb through the coloring books I picked up to do with my mother-in-law and the jewelry odds and ends I'd been playing with for my nephew's graduation several years ago and just, sort of, forget about writing. I'm in the mood to vacation in places where certain people are still society page caricatures and dystopias are an as-yet-unrealized trend. I am generally a happier person than this. That's where I'd like to go. 

-- Chrissa 

This, Our Ghost

 

It should have begun with “Once upon a time,

a family member was Catholic…” and then

we all chose a flavor of protestant and kept going.

Kept preaching. Kept having families.

Kept believing.

We forgot this. Or someone took a vacation

in darker places. I can’t let it go, this rosary,

even with the label I’m half-reading in the box,

Saying “human bone.”

This is the vesicle hollow, this is the light

Thick with afternoon, with water, with trees

Making my hands look prayerful, calm—

This is horror.

It begins with “We never speak about her,

forget her children, forget unsolemnized birth;

we don’t have the pictures of this place.

Put that down.

If she picked this up, younger than I am,

thinking that it might be nice to give care

to what she could, as she could,

What care is due?

It ends with a solid fencing of my fears.

Unknown kids trail guns through the woods;

remember that when the light falls just so

It limns our ghosts.

Sharing for Magaly's prompt at Poets and Storytellers United. In this year of a thousand reminders of grief and the frangible nature of family, I find that even looking at pictures of anything removed from this present moment feels fake. How could there have ever been a time before now, before this? How could any ghost not be plastic? But after the pictures are stuffed in albums, there's still that trace of stickiness on the fingers. How could any revenant not haunt?

The above photo is authentic...

-- Chrissa 

The Dark Thoughts Are Hunters

 

First comes the smoke, drifting in spirals.
I've seen it delicate and dirty, 30 feet high; 
Nerves fire like lights through the fog of an 80's video--
Fear strobes, anxiety hisses sparks and lasers,
but then,
then...
The tortoiseshell teases the tendrils of fog
Until it clears.
It's all light; it's all a deep breath in darkness.
Your empty streets are filled 
with memories on a blood/bass pulse
and then the glass breaks, stone against time;
slow fall of clarity, slump of sand against fire.
Dark thoughts hunt idolators in the emptiness.
Clear, remembered ways are full of them.
Here the worst thoughts cower,
their yesterday masks over their fangs.
Dark thoughts feel them in their whiskers,
in their serrated fur.
Dark thoughts are hunters.

Welcome to the blog on another hint of fall morning in this choose-your-own-apocalypse of a year. There may be coffee later and I am about to light a candle and think about whether dreaming for several nights in a row about moving has any significance (probably not--although I might have a touch of cabin fever). Unfinished projects are starting to feel more like undead projects. It's a weird time. People are angry because I'm taking a pandemic seriously. 

People...are...angry...because...I'm...taking...a...pandemic...seriously. 

I think the noise is finally swamping the signal. 

-- Chrissa

Restless Ocean

 

I was a dilatory landlord, the sea reassured us.

We were in Dillard's, were the glass doors still worked.

They didn't stop the water, but they stopped crabs

and other things that switched their spines

through the dark green waters.

I was a dilatory landlord; the whales sang 

Slow as the old globe turned and there was the embrace

of the moon to measure embraces;

beats like years to trace my heart on these shorelines,

to keep me bounded. But--

you killed the whales.

Scraped their song right out of the rind

of the land that was.

I cried to the moon to lift me up,

to pour me back through the song.

And I rolled through here. Once. Twice.

Third time and I'm standing here, watching this

dry shipwreck, this...mall...fill to floating.

Fill to sinking.

I'll let you go, you sing me back quiet again.

For Carrie's prompt "Abandoned,"  WordCrafters 10/14/2020

-- Chrissa

Night Light, Silence

 

Kept my jaw so tight; all I lost were teeth

Walked into the sea; all I saw were teeth

Swept my hand through moonlight; all I met were teeth

Call the dreams with burning air, with glass

Listen for the sluice of waves; we separate them there.

Drowned my words just right; all I lost was breath

Swallowed salt to taste my fears; all I wept was breath

Tossed a book into the trash; all I heard was breath 

Call the dreams with burning air, with glass

Listen for the sluice of waves; we separate them there

Sharing with a wonderful group of poets and yet another awesome group of poets. :) Basically, poets are wonderful people and poems are wonderful things...with apologizes to A.A. Milne or Walt Disney and the writer of Tigger's wonderful song about himself. I am not made of rubber & springs, but I am half wishing that I had that ability to leap over grumpiness and puzzlement and just glory in whatever wonderful thing has caught my attention, rather than doomscrolling (a new favorite word) for the latest in excavating the bar for the ease of bad ideas. Which is why at least one day of poems is a wonderful, human thing. Poems aren't (generally) just lugubrious paeans to the shovel, shrugging blithely but grimly as another depth is reached. They point out that there is more to the world than the shovel; that the shovel has a wielder; that butterflies are landing on the mound of excavated dirt; that a shovel is a tool that can be put away. And poems are wonderous, wonderful, wandering things. 

-- Chrissa

In the Bleak Strip Center

 

Down the hall in the old strip center you could catch her walking:
The smell of someone’s perfume, the press of someone’s hurry
The soft slap of someone’s sandals, the flick of someone’s skirt.
 
Have lunch with me in autumn, at the garden chairs and tables
Where the stores used to flourish and some bushes still do;
We’ll let the chairs tattoo diamonds on our legs, remembering.
 
Come to the old strip center, where we followed her,
Ghost of all the perfect girls, rumor of all the dying malls;
Down the hallway, past the doors, beyond all the stores.
 
Come when the days are colder;
Bring the lunch we used to order.

It's entirely possible I've been watching too many dead mall videos, wishing I could be at a mall right now, bored in the linen section, listening to people trying to differentiate between museum decorum and creepy quiet mall wariness. 

-- Chrissa

Necessary Horizon

 

There were never transmissions from the floating deepness.

Waves elongated, lost themselves in their own curves, mimicked

songs that were being sung, secrets that were being passed;

they dissipated through their own curiosity.

Receivers were hung off coasts and above the atmosphere;

elegant branching equations detached themselves from one hand

to settle in the cranial valleys of another seeker, grew new branches.

Still, the sounds never made it into our empty boxes.

It's easy to breathe all the way to the edges of your lungs,

to feel them fill and think about drifting upward or pushing,

gently, with a single toe and launching yourself, starfished,

into what your muscles assure you is a form of flight.

Only, your ears assure you, you've been deceived; the 

axis is there for a reason, the horizon for a necessary balance.

Mermaids are a myth, their song ultimately meets our deafness.

Sirens have always warned us of the lure of unspun space.

So, the flick of light in the night sky, like moonlight,

is all that remains of what angels were before feathers,

halos, and upright-on-two-legs, dry. That tilt, that fall into

knowledge, the lurch of the ground underfoot.

Sharing this week with The Sunday Muse, hosted by the awesome Carrie, and Poets and Storytellers United. Lately, I've been realizing two things--first, I shouldn't have tried to do a combination of Inktober and an American sentence a day. I can't draw and attempting to illustrate what I'm writing does weird things to my writer brain. It seemed like a good idea at the time... 

Second, poetry is becoming my laundry. I'm really happy to use it to avoid thinking about things that make me angry or the way living as if certain things exist in the real world makes me seem like the panicked alien among the locals. Do you see that giant fanged beast charging down the street? No, fine. Yes, we all step aside, but it's just a kind of cultural response to the Myth of the Fanged Beast. It totally wouldn't have eaten that guy if he'd just remembered today was the Day of the Fanged Beast, and, I don't know, stayed home if he couldn't swerve fast enough. You're fine. We're fine. Keep moving. 

All this to say--not sure if I trust my writing right now. 

-- Chrissa

Who Tells The Tale?

 

I will make you no promises,

said the Moon as she pulled the bow

from my hair.

I will build you no bright skies,

she said as she ran her fingers

crown to nape.

I will fill the world space-deep;

set stars like shells along those beaches.

Swim there, tonight.

Sharing today as part of the Friday Flash 55: Light in the Time of Plague. 

-- Chrissa