Silence

There was the one time...

We are on the phone, the line drops

Silence leaks into my ear

She was just about to graduate.

It seems like the end, there.

With graduation within reach, 

Cap and gown, maybe, hanging

In a closet.

We were surprised, but she was

Always the one who knew her own mind.

I close my eyes as the line drops

Again

Silence is running down my cheek

Dripping onto my collarbone.

I don't know why I am seeing

Her scarlet mortarboard on a peg

Or my aunt's face. I never asked

What her graduation was like,

Never even considered she'd been to high school.

Anyway, Kelly moved shortly afterwards.

She didn't make it to the reunion.

At least, we didn't see her.

I remember ham and mustard sandwiches

A big park full of oaks, hunting acorns.

It was the mid-70s and my aunt

Had skipped the reunion

Although my parents brought us.

And I have no idea who Kelly is

Or why even the phone drops her

Name.

Just in case my mother wanders across the poem:  The only realistic elements in here are (1) the annoying way our phones drop lines and (2) mustard on sandwiches at a random reunion. Sharing this with Poet's United Poetry Pantry and with The Sunday Muse.

Hope those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving last week had a wonderful time with family and friends!

-- Chrissa

These Are the Plates

Here they are; washed, like every year.
These are the everyday and those are the holiday--
Washed by hand, careful of the rims...every year--
Ever since we bought this house and your grandmother
Came down that first time,
Boxes packed with china lining the backseat of the Cadillac.

We had a house and a family
And it was time for me to host the holidays.
The one where you were sick, the one time
It froze and your uncle almost broke his neck
Skidding across puddles out behind the fence
Before they cleared it and built the houses.

Your grandparents would come, sometimes
All of the them, sometimes the extended family,
Aunts and cousins...you remember.

We'd bring them down from the top of the cabinet
I'd catch you or your brother climbing up
To reach those shelves, clinging to the edges
of the shelves...there was that time you started
Screaming...just yelling...because of a dead roach
Stretched out like a grasshopper in a coffee cup.

Yesterday you told me that you'd had
A brush of fear, listening to your nephew
Talk about driving to work, the entire length
Of one side of Houston, all the hours on the roads...
Did you hear your brother's friend talking
Last night, one of his kids living in the same apartments
We did when we moved here.

I heard it in his voice, too.

Anyway, these are the dishes. We'll pack them up
And you can pretend you're driving that boat of a Cadillac--
Think about your grandmother and be careful--
And we'll see them again at Thanksgiving.
Wash them before you put them away.
And mind the rims.

Posting this to both The Sunday Muse and Poets United (for Poetry Pantry #429) in honor of family traditions and succeeding generations. :) Hope you have a wonderful week and, for those of you celebrating it this week, a very happy Thanksgiving.

-- Chrissa

Dark Couch

Wish upon a dark, tilting sea
A fish in a bottle floating in the light
Spoonfuls of saltwater
            In amber glass
            Silver spoon
            Sunlight
            Mouth

Plastic alligators lurk among our limbs
Down at the bottom of the wading pools
Splayed toes soft as fur
Our underwater eyes, our amber vision
            Yellow skies
            Breathable air

Elbows balancing bodies in our puddle
Uneasy land-crabs watching the edges
What you remember is the unsettled sea
            In your stomach
            In your nose

The Heat You Hold

I never asked for the way your hands came together
Fingertips like match heads struck beneath the pines
Where the smoke stalks the clouds

I never asked for the fire that keeps us afloat
Above the water, above the cold, above the clay
When a clap snaps us from our seats

Hallelujah racing through our throats and chests
Above the cement rows, amphitheater of our days
Wicks to luminaries along your path

While you walk down the only flickering aisle
From altar of Once, to altar of Time, to light Eternity
With the heat you hold.

Sharing with The Sunday Muse for Muse #29  and with  Poets United for Poetry Pantry #428. Not sure where this one came from, so I'll just take it as a gift after being chilled a little too much yesterday while walking around a local Renaissance festival. Sometimes Texas is a little cooler (and more damp) than expected. Hope everyone has a great week & finds spare writing time. :)

-- Chrissa

Wednesday WordCrafters Prompt

Carrie's prompt tonight was a guess-the-celebrity prompt. Write a short piece and guess to whom the piece refers. Here's mine:

Like a fading vinyl ad
Peeling to a clean glass mirror
Catching all the ghosts downtown
His shadow's lean and slick
Glasses, blue jeans--and something
Rasping like asphalt, rotating,
Flashing like a holy wheel
Limning boys like your dad
In the once upon a school day
He ascends
Cold fire on the wing
Silhouette
Black as glass frames
He's the boy a decade dreams
Before it startles awake.

So...there's not that many clues in the poem and I'm pretty sure the blue jeans are a misdirection, but I was thinking of Buddy Holly tonight. At least, about the way that people shift and change and the way boys can sometimes be fragile; how they can seem younger than they are when new experiences scrape the rust off your own memories of years past. Anyway, that's tonight and now I'm off to sit with the pup who's not too fond of thunder. 

-- Chrissa

FM Once Upon a Time

Shoot the sleeves; lining bobsleds the cotton
Cuffs tap your wrists; slacks fall, unwrinkled,
Straight from your hips to pool like the curtains--
It's always the curtains...

Barefoot on the dock of the retention pond
Whitecaps starving for your toes, foaming
For that last taste of you, skin still burnt from
Scholarship arguments...

Lights and cars; roads and monuments sink
Like fairyland underneath that oak tree
You told instead of their faces, like a sacrifice
You couldn't watch

You can explain your qualifications to the city
En Francais while you feel the soft wood trembling
Beneath your soles, watch the window like water
Behind the manager

You can smell the cows gathered by the fence
On your skin, always smarter than you, sticking
Together; a deeper voice, slow and angry, 
In your pulse

There's no soul you've got left to exchange
You left it shredded like plastic on a barbwire
Fence, down in Texas, trying to fly from
A jealous fairy king.

Linking (maybe) to The Sunday Muse. 

-- Chrissa