Sunday, April 28, 2019

The Universe Which Died Yesterday

Photo by Josiel Miranda from Pexels, image prompt from The Sunday Muse

There is a place where the flood came to the dock
Where the boat was waiting; we had both learned
How to use the oars in rolling water, to not fear
Water over our feet, to know that all the branches,
The leaves, the dirt, the fencing, would settle
When the wind dropped. The water may be higher,
The lake fuller, but we would still be floating.

Sharing this with both The Sunday Muse and with Poets United. Embarrassed to say that I'm having a little creative interference this weekend, so this may be less coherent than usual. :)

-- Chrissa

Friday, April 26, 2019

Blue Coconut Days


I'm already sticking to the paper
Where syrup and afternoon fuse
My fingers to grass, denim, and skin
To sugar, sunlight, and blue dye
Blue sky and my cousins' gossip;
Heat lifting us from ourselves
Gluing us to each vacation day
Loosely,
Gummily,
Fully.

Sharing with The Sunday Muse for Wednesday's "Let's Dance" prompt. Note: there is no dancing in this. Except for the bee. The bee is probably dancing. Go, bee!

-- Chrissa

Sunday, April 21, 2019

Lola/Rollo


There's a triumvirate here, waiting to dance
Waiting for the train or the cab, for me,
Waiting for permission.

Old monikers, a Muse, and the grey street
Twirl the names Lola, then Rollo
Under the tongue.

Not who are we today, but what city
Are we when we travel, what news
Will mask our going on?

We are waiting to find the voice stitch
That knits the ink to the pepper
That seasons our steps.

We are waiting to dance--waiting to dance
With the wheels and the whiles,
To swirl seems and styles.

Sharing today with The Sunday Muse for The Muse #52. The cool prompt image this week takes me back to afternoons watching black & white movies while my mother or grandmother did housework (and tried to keep my brother and I in one place or at least from spreading ourselves around the Entire House)--the contrast between "the city" as intriguing in those shows and "the city" as something to be avoided in my nascent fantasy reading has stuck with me, a sense of bifurcation that sometimes pulls me to silence rather than creation. Also, who hasn't wanted to dance their way across blocks and buses and crowds?

-- Chrissa

Friday, April 19, 2019

Easter

With the scent of spring onions,
With the pastel flash of chocolate eggs,
Comes the memory of a small church
One Easter, decades ago, with just my grandmother.
A pale Easter dress, my vacation restlessness,
Dew on the duplex yard, damp tights
A mother who insisted her daughter share
Her basket of candy (which vanished during the service,
Like a rabbit among the pews).

Spring is born in the hairdressers, on tomato vines,
In the fur of a glass-eyed rabbit, a kitten purse.
Trellis inside the church, trellis wallpaper at the salon,
Trellis in the backyard
Training the vine of memories:
The generous girl
The disappearing candy
My grandmother
Born again and again
In the smell of spring onions.

Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Busy Body/Let it Rest Prompt


Warm curl of a dog
Lying against the day's thought
Untwists my tight spine

Sharing with The Wednesday Muse for the Busy Body prompt

-- Chrissa

Tuesday, April 16, 2019

Weed(Wildflower)

Mystify

The questions and answers echo across the quiet road. Ripples stiffen on the pond that's become mud and a shiver shakes a seed into a root. The rains will come again. Today the breeze is the river, running too fast for the clouds to clot and sink. You can see it filling the shadows of the clouds' underbellies. In the dark spots, where the waters gather. Old formulas crumble into their symbols as the Jenny pulls herself from the dirt.

She has feet, hands, a hunger. She is the wild, desiccated ghost of naiad, birthed like a frog, no longer water but not separate from it. The squirrels toss her the bitter, half-fey fruit that grows by the pond the naturalist dug for his fabulist wife.  She ignores the fruit.

They've thrown this fruit to others.

Everything meets in the water, dissolves, tangles, dries out, is cut and restained. Paper, old or art paper, can be made from a similar flood, drained to a slurry and threaded with old denim, silk, and cotton memories. Wet thoughts drying at the tips of your fingers.

So windy outside, breath is shoved into your lungs before the thoughts form. The sky is sweeping aside its dust covers. Jenny watches the birds swoop and slice. She follows the wind against the fence, entering the front yard like the shadow of a great shark.


Bury

The woman who called the questions is now kneeling in the front yard. Tiny plants stretch across an open bed. Jenny's  hands tighten on the branch she holds, fingers gummy with the thick sap. She scurries like the leaves, like the squirrels.

Wind sweeps words and leaf litter into the yard. The woman turns as the Jenny braces her joints and holds out the slimy rootstock. "We're moving.They're moving. Can you plant this? Keep it somewhere damp?"

The woman stabs her trowel through the mostly empty bag of potting soil, anchoring it. She stacks up the plastic pots and examines the offered rootstock before asking, "Does it get bigger? Is it poisonous? I have a dog. I've never seen anything like it."

Jenny shakes her head. Watches her root bleed down her forearm, then onto the woman's yard. "No poison."

"I might have a pot in the back You're not one of Geoff's daughters?" The girl looks feral. The woman remembers kids like this from around the block, when her daughter was young. She has a pot by the pool she wants to fill. "Does it bloom?"

The Jenny nods and twists the branch to show a half-crushed bud. The woman stands up and leads the girl around back. Jenny admits she lives behind the fence. The squirrels in this yard yell and race up the branches between the yards.

There's an old plastic pot near the small backyard pool, designed to look like concrete imitating marble. Moss is growing in the volutes. Jenny hands the woman her rootstock and the woman excavates a slim hole, presses the branch in, and then gets the hose and sprays pot and branch until the Jenny relaxes and there is a puddle of city water near both the pool and the spigot.

Sharp, dark reflections catch branches and clouds at their feet.

Spin

The woman's daughter, home from college and from sneaking into the neighbor's backyard, watches from behind a window. She can taste the bitter rinds the squirrels tossed at her, like the ashes of answers.

She's heard rumors of the pond since her freshman year, always thought she'd be invited to see it. When the naturalist and the fabulist moved out, she'd just walked across the street, flipped the lid on the For Sale information window, scrabbled for a flier, and then tried the back gate.

She'd never been that brazen but her sense of home, lately, had felt as if it was drying up, withdrawing from the city, to the neighborhood, to the edges of the lawn, to the walls of her parents' house. Boundaries evaporated.

She watches the girl wipe her hands on her jean shorts. Watches the branches whip around, the spray from the hose fold back towards her mother. Then she feels the tremble under her feet, something like an airplane running underground, stories murmuring in cracks.

In a subdivision across town, Lake Creek sloshes against its banks. Ants pile up from nearby mounds. Roots race themselves to a new upswelling. Bastian Creek tumbles down a ditch beside Lake Creek, running by the newly broken ground of The City. The Jenny's new home soaks up rumor and rainwater and she waits for the daughter to come outside and bring a snack. And a boat.

***

This grew from a Sunday prose exercise that I never finished...just kept writing. I may have filled a small notebook...the Jenny and the Daughter feel like narrators for upcoming stories. Maybe. 

-- Chrissa

Sunday, April 14, 2019

The Small Cathedral


Saturday breakfast between football and a prayer group
Down the Gulf coast of Texas, where the blood
Sometimes runs sienna, sometimes umber, red, maroon...
Born where the pipes' pulse set the health of the family.
There's not always a sign when something goes silent
Until the day you're holding yourself up,
Rain drumming the spine of a low bus
On a campus full of generations looking up and down--
And you remember your nostalgia watching Happy Days
For your parents' lives. Maybe you knew, then,
That the small cathedral would always be dark,
Would lack a congregation. You only notice
When others' altar lights make the dust sparkle
And your knees buckle
But your wrist holds.

Sharing with The Sunday Muse and with Poets United for the Poetry Pantry #446.

Thursday, April 11, 2019

Blank Space Where My Thoughts Should Be


It's a risky day for building,
Constructing a city from rags and motion.
You'll light it with whatever sparks
In the dark of your eyelids
And find the wires for the paintbox
Trailing thunderheads like tentacles.
Advertise in sting and explosion--
Connect it to the skyrise
Up where some cloud
Already palm-printed the blue.
If you're going to dream,
Today you'll build us cities of rain.

Sharing today with The Wednesday Muse for a prompt on rain. :) 

-- Chrissa

Sunday, April 7, 2019

Come Closer

Where X has locked the spot, preserved the fiction
That we are about to enter, about to know
Where she kept her chickens, where she kept her children...

There--

Lean against the hill's barn door.
You can hear the fiddles in the middle distance;
Someone must be dancing.

They say their rings are perfect and they gleam!
Dancers polishing a gold and concrete formation.
I hear that only the reckless see the fairies.

You could see mockingbirds and lizards
In dolls' waistcoats and old taffeta dresses--
Cold.

Maybe the scholars see the dead in them...but you,
You never read that last analysis of those old tales,
The one that tagged their toes with version numbers,
The one that racked them like a withered symphony.

Listen. It's all music, spinning like the spiders
In these old corners.
You've pulled your share of tunes to the ground,
Slapped a few concertos from the path.
Music is easy, music requires no detox.

Whatever you hear, come see.
What you fear, come be.

Let's just say that I am never the one who says "Let's stop at there and see what that's all about." I am the person who has Yelp open and is checking to see whether other people have eaten or visited and would return. I am the person who is more likely to say that something looks closed because I can't see lights through the smoked glass. You will not find me leaning against a barn door in the middle of nowhere trying to determine whether I know the song I keep hearing in the distance. Probably.

And I'm definitely the person who is thinking about a flash story about haunted Yelp reviews. :)

Hope you're having a non-haunted week and yet encountering a good run of stories. Sharing this one today with The Sunday Muse which is today celebrating the 50th prompt! Yea!! Thanks, Carrie for creating this engaging space to spend part of our week and please come join the community if you're so inclined.

-- Chrissa

Wednesday, April 3, 2019

Glory Seeds



There are myths spreading like fingers through sand;
Flowers that appear on the fences edging the playground
And you try to take them home, tame them.
Fill your dad's film canister with seeds, rattle them
All day in your desk, in your pocket;
Wait for the lawn mowers and morning glories
To tame and free the grass.

Sharing today with the Wednesday Muse. Today's theme is spring flowers and it feels that there are a million ways to go with this--the azaleas at Mercer (a personal favorite), Mom's azaleas and the fact I loved the blue color of Miracle Gro (not enough to touch it, just enough to watch Mom feed them), the smell of spring onions, the smell of the wisteria, the way a bee shows up when the wisteria blooms to police our front walkway (NOT where the wisteria is located), the smell of a blooming apricot at Mercer...I have, unfortunately, never seen a cherry blossom, which Toni describes so beautifully in the Muse. Therefore, today's spring verse refers to morning glories (technically summer blooms) in elementary school. Hope everyone has a lovely week! :)

-- Chrissa