Starlight, Cafe

 

The coffee is cool; oh, there was a story.

You just missed it, wrapped in fire,

smelling like espresso and ash.

Christmas ghosts and patrons alike

haunted our table, smoke-thin,

where it was sitting, sipping.

I'd offer you a new cup, full and hot,

but...you'd have to tell it cold.

Maybe your skin is...?

But no, I see that you're as chill

as I; masked as I. Ah well.

Stories burn nearby.

For The Sunday Muse. This week I wanted to talk about stories and the way that flicker down to embers at this time of year. I've been thinking about all the drafts that remain layered in notebooks and the way that this year ends in that indefinite space, with unread books surrounding me in a fort built of blankets, a chaise lounge, chairs, and bookshelves. Part of the weirdness of this year has been building spaces all around the house that are nooks for reading and writing and then...neither reading nor writing anything from beginning to end. 

Next year (next week, just over the horizon), I'm thinking about writing to the family I've been mostly unable to see this year. Finishing novels just for them. Next year, I'd like to celebrate a spin on the Icelandic tradition of books for Christmas by giving several of them those books, written to them, for them. An impossible goal for improbable times, yes?

-- Chrissa

Christmas 55

 

There's a creature smothering

in the ice blue sea,

caught like a cave painting

in the year's thick ice.

I can drive over tundra,

downshifting to holiday--

the gifts are wrapped,

family called,

food cooked.

At some point, though,

I'm going to need that ax.

The emergency one

I've been told rests 

in my library.

Sharing to the Friday 55 this morning. Wishing everyone a cozy day and a good book (and coffee or cocoa or tea). I'm going to be shoring up the book fort because fireworks started in our neighborhood last night and I have a feeling Arthur is going to need a good place to hide. 

-- Chrissa

Scheme Season

 

Light days are coming and I should prepare;

now, in the cool, the grey, and the drear

schemes for the resolute

sneak softly near.

Long days approach and thus ready at need

are plot's dark, gem-solid seeds.

Cold ground at my wrist

holds them beneath.

Resolutions bore me.

Tis the season for schemes.

Schemes or ghost stories. Waiting out the rain. Counting down the last days of 2020. Also, I can't take the credit for the idea of Scheme Season--the phrasing was part of a Bernadette Banner IG post regarding planning for 2021. Who hasn't had a moment of thinking schemes would be more fun?

Also, wishing all of you who celebrate a very merry Christmas! And, of course, good food, warmth, and poetry for everyone. :) This isn't our yard, but it's a sentiment that I approve of:  cocoa and dragons! 

Sharing this week with The Sunday Muse and Poets and Storytellers United. Come read & share. Or just read. :) Happy Holidays!!

-- Chrissa

WordCrafters Wednesday Prompt

WordCrafters Wednesday Prompt: White Christmas/Holiday/New Year/Calendar of Days

Calendar of Days 

By book, by title, by shirts hung, by towels folded

by words written, by photos taken, by photos printed,

by birthdays, by holidays--secular and sacred.

By calls to my parents, by calls from my nephew.

By post, by like, by share. By meltdown,

by panic attack, by late night, by nightmare,

by number of Disney shows watched 

after midnight.

By candles burned, by notebooks filled, by 

scones eaten, by the wheel of daily medication,

by walks in the park.

By the days beyond 2020. 

Please note--the image is from Pexels (Bich Tran: Writing in a Planner)...maybe 2021 is the year I'll embrace the bullet journal. Probably not, though. Are there that many things I need to track? If you bullet journal, what are your best tips for doing more than one month at a time? 

I'm not a stats person, but this is my last WordCrafters post for the year, so here are a few stats:

• 63 books read 
• Favorite poetry books: Somewhere to Come From (L. Lewis), Every Song Is My Mother's Arms (C. Van Horn), We Were All Someone Else Yesterday (Omar Holmon)
• 4 novella drafts 
• 100 poems blogged

Because the majority of this wouldn't be possible with this group, a huge thank you to everyone and a crazy Muppet cheer for Carrie for everything that she's done--those poems listed above? From Carrie's prompts. The fact that we're still meeting, despite lacking a library building and in the middle of a pandemic is down to Carrie's amazing ability to overcome, not to mention her creating and maintaining The Sunday Muse for weekly prompts and poetry community. An entire cast of Muppet cheers! Yea, Carrie!!

I'm not ready for goals for 2021. I'm working on a Bastian Creek fable & re-reading Art & Fear. 2020 finally revised my go-to anxiety dream:  it's now realizing that I've been shopping & am not wearing a mask. I'm glad that there are still Christmas lights in the neighborhood.

Thanks for being part of this blog. 

-- Chrissa

We Become Mountains

 

First, we’re close enough to the grass to hear the singing light;
the buzz of every velvet thought before the carapace wears hard.
And then there’s the time when all the willows come to the river,
Wash their toes, gild and vermeil their hair, whisper supple ripples
down the water. The oaks hear this from further in the grass. 
All the roots are bound with mycelium dreams, drunk from rain and river. 

The spreading soil grows loose, down to the limestone. 

You feel it, gradually, as the body separates from the pointed soil.
One night, everything laces close to the bone and digs in.
Loosens, sloughs away. But eventually—the bone is set.

Once upon a grid, there will be soundings and the deep root 

of buildings, humming with the electric thoughts, itchier than roots.

Evanescent. And the bright and the velvet and the flexible and the loose
Will settle around this mimicry of mountains. And we’ll go, too,

bodies free of the riverine dreams and ready to climb
into the business ranges, out along the commercial ridges,
peeling open the cans of processed song and turning on
buzzing light. Eventually, though, the songs taste different,
the light settles on our skin in ridges and rings and we know.
We will become mountains, the underlying. 

The hard fact of yesterday which is recognized only viscerally,

gently, by the roots or the hollow caves in the mimic mountains,

by the lovely pastel geographies of how the land moves
slowly, sometimes, into the planes beneath the parkland.

It's the goal-end of the year, the time when new months are plotted, resolutions anticipated, and the year that was has a giant, exploding crystal ball dropped on it because IT TOTALLY DESERVES IT. December finds me opening unread books, reading a few chapters or lines or pages and abandoning them back on the stack. I pretend that I have goals for finishing the things I have started. I pretend that it's totally normal to be pissed off at the guy who was whistling Christmas carols as he left the Dr.'s office yesterday (where I was for a minor check-up)...because PUT YOUR MASK OVER YOUR FACE, DUDE. I empathize with every fragile ornament we put on the tree and fight the urge to tell my partner to just put it back in the wrapping and maybe it'll be okay for another year. And I wonder what this year will be like, when it's the past that's a new year is built upon.

Sharing with The Sunday Muse (thanks to Carrie for a cool prompt & sorry for the shouty follow-on) and Poets and Storytellers United.

-- Chrissa

Brilliance

 

WordCrafters Wednesday Prompt: BRILLIANCE

It can be the brilliance of light upon a tree in winter, or a brilliant mind, anyway or concept you can use the term is fair game.

My Response:

We put up the lights. Then we waited and put up some of the ornaments. I'm not sure why "brilliance" immediately evokes darkness, as if one is only sharp in contrast to its absence, but it feels as if this season has been muted, as if, like so many other aspects of the year, it's happening beside me but without me. The brilliance is there, but it's not passing through me.

It's the time of year to plug in the lights.

Wait until the sun sinks, I assume to stay awake

On the other side of the world, tired 

but wide-eyed.

It's the brightest time, the darkest.

Evening hums like a startled nest of photons,

vibrating through my lenses

merry and wild.

It's a blind bend in the darkness.

Time slaloming through chill space, past chunks

where they'll slice it to seconds

and finer.

It's the winter tide, Christmas time.

Here, there's the cold wash of night perforated

by the houses, the bushes, deer,

limned bright.

--  Chrissa

In the Dead Malls of My Childhood

 

A flickering buzz reveals the tiled and plastered dead

In shadowed concourse, in banked elevators, in logo t-shirts.

I want to overshout the frequency--where is Gen X?

What was left in dusty bays, now empty?

Glittering ash, unswept glass; neon-burned by the 80's.

It's a decade for the quasar-born, the 80's,

Space-wide, just discovering the lonely, pulsing dead.

Even without it's neon makeup, it's empty,

A cotton rustle, an alien flash, glitter t-shirts

Remain silent in the abyss beneath our shoes--

This cave used to be Gen X.

It was ours, but what is a cohort? Gen X

Can't own a decade, sign for a mall, beam live from the 80's

We can't dance funky in each other's mother's shoes

Because this space groans, already dead

We got the drawerful of concert t-shirts

But when he presses the button, the speaker's empty.

Where the did this concourse drain itself empty?

Where did they go, the acid wash of Gen X?

Try to clean the rain from the glass with t-shirts

But it's a cold plaster storm of trash, blowing from the 80's:

Music like hailstones, electricity dead,

Chords keeping us stiff in our unlit shoes.

I see the labelscarred shelves nude of shoes

Every case, hanger, kiosk, body left empty.

We'll outfit the plaster as if the heroic dead

slung a guitar through the chorus in a Gen-X

movie, the kind where suburban hagiography, so 80's,

Says malls are choice, everything is cool as t-shirts.

Roll our flag in the cotton sleeves of three t-shirts

Worn barefoot, despite the plaster cast of shoes.

Mannequins and muses lived on screen in the 80's.

But all those movies' sleeves are empty.

We shot all the aliens--we're Gen X! 

But we didn't save them; the malls, too, are dead.

We're a holographic 80's band, our cassette, t-shirts,

summoning the dead with a kickflip, without shoes.

In an empty suburban lot, celluloid hisses "Gen X."

It's not great. It's not necessarily completely intelligible. But it's within the broad I'm-going-to-give-myself-a-break definition of sestina and therefore--yea!! Finally. A rough sestina. I think next year I might be exploring more poetic forms and maybe revisit this. What will it look like if I spend a year working on it? Well, pretty much exactly like a dead mall, probably -- hollow and disintegrating. Let's find out! :) 

-- Chrissa

The Body Politic

 

The body politic rarely appears

in its breathing myth body, rarely tramples anyone

wearing its own face.

But we are oversaturated, overheated

and it must fall out of solution and run triumphant

through us until, crushed,

we are small enough to fizz away,

to create the dyspeptic, bitter waters of relief 

it will then drink.

Deflated, it will belch, consider

us fondly, all the tiny crumbs of anger gone

to brilliant thunder.

And then, it will leave the car. 

The daily papers will absorb it, like an oil stain

in the shape of god.

 

I was in a bit of a mood this morning. There was an argument that revolved, in addition to other things, around control and who has the right to control what aspects of your life. Where does your morality end and another's begin? Is it okay to unfriend someone online with whom you'd still be happy to talk to IRL? It wasn't particularly heated and no answers were determined, as those discussions tend to remain unresolved. One of us discovered a pile of laundry that hadn't been put in the machine (that would be me) and the practicalities of having been waiting for a buzzer that was obviously NOT going to go off in the immediate future replaced endless wrangling about 2020. Soon, hanging that laundry up will replace drafting poetry...but poetry will gain the upper hand again this afternoon, when I attempt a sestina. I've never had luck with this form. I've never finished a poem in this form. I'm a little bit imagining this attempt as the creation of a spear aimed right at the black heart of a terrible year. I'm a little bit imagining this attempt as an excuse to avoid working on other things. 

I hope to post again tomorrow, spear in hand. 

-- Chrissa

Fallowmass

 

I need to

pull a thread, let the day unravel on this axis,

cut the cotton as if I was holding fate in silver blades

...or would they be iron? This time of year

either would be cold and both linger in the twilight.

You'll need a wick for the setting and the rising;

I feel the stars behind me, beneath me, above me--

there's no liturgy and the only prayers

here in the hallow of the year, in the hollow,

are old songs chanted on a driveway.

Sleep for a moment under that unraveled day

and old dreams will pick up the notes

and knit your heart back into sun.

The back door is open and our oldest dog is sleeping behind me and the house is chilly and dark and this year...this freaking year. I feel like it's staining my toes with the cold through my socks. I've been thinking that we need one of those one-off holidays, a national day of wrapping ourselves in blankets and sitting with the enormity of 2020.

It's the time of year, in between decorations and cheer, that reminds me that I don't know as much as I'd like at this time in my life and that if I did, I'd just be frustrated with trying to explain it to those around me. It's a good time for reading, so I'm sharing this with The Sunday Muse and  Poets and Storytellers United and heading out on a round of visiting the neighboring poets. 

-- Chrissa 

In a Fallow Season

 

We need the leaves to blanket us

We need our blankets to crumble into us

We need our roots to work the soil's stiffness

Hollow.

We need the wind to rake us 

We need our limbs to grow bare

We need the bareness to reveal, not barrenness,

But growth.

We need a fallow season

We need a deep sleep to plant dreams in 

We need our long dreams to coil the starlight's

Rough rope.

We need the rope for swings

We need to swing on thin limbs and leaves

We need to sieve the daylight for water, light,

And hope.

 

I was thinking, this morning, that we...that I...needed a day that wasn't a holiday celebration, but rather a holiday remembrance. That there should be a day, in between Thanksgiving and Christmas, to let the sorrows of the year live for a time and then be--in so far as possible--left to rest. I think that with all the coverage of the monolith in the desert, I have been thinking about the need for space that isn't already inscribed with meaning to catch the small and large losses and missteps and regrets of the year gone by. And that could just be 2020. It could just be the exhaustion of year of broken sleep and long stretches of isolation. This is a year of altars. 

-- Chrissa 

And Now, A Little December Interlude

 So, we've arrived at the  post-Thanksgiving doldrums. In addition to not knowing what day of the week it was (it's Wednesday, as my mom pointed out when I wished her a happy Monday this morning), the post-project crash I fail to anticipate every NaNo has come. This means it's time to think about next year and put some goals in place. 

First goal:  First Friday posting -- the first Friday of each month I'll create a post about what I've read, written, and edited the previous month. Hoping that this provides momentum to keep working on projects in a way NaNoWriMo encourages working on a draft. 

Second goal: Impromptu -- finishing this poetry compilation the associated essays. This will be limited to poems written during 2020 and the goal is to have between two and three short essays regarding how these came about.

Third goal: Ibis, Buzzard, Mockingbird, Dragon -- This is a short story fable that I want to finish revising during the month of December. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but it'll be in some final form by 2021.

Fourth goal: Yeah, this is where I pretend that I'm going to finish that hot mess of a NaNo project at some point. Two books, four stories; variations on the theme of seasons of quarantine. 

And now, let's return to our regularly scheduled poetry program...

DECEMBER

Here the year goes to concrete clouds and leggings,

sweaters and the preparations for a turn, wobbling,

before it rolls away. I was born there,

in the shadow of that revolution or the falling arch

and it stills its spin just before Christmas, like a child

leaning against the plummet of a swing.

The year ends here in a wingless flight, toes pointed,

waiting on gravity, on time, on tomorrow.