Dead Malls

 

[Image by Forgotten Heritage]

Image provided by Writing in the Woods/Conroe & Spring NaNoWriMo

There were stores that had been stocked last week,

trucks that rolled before the cool front to the longer summer on our shore,

but the malls were closed.

Here levers and gauges and men and women 

Pulled and stoppered and stretched and dialed plastic fire until it bit

itself into shapes for the malls.

It was only last month that our cars sighed into the lines

you could see from the ladder through the shop's cathedral window; bow, quick,

Before the malls have closed.

We were talking about dinner at the handrail

When a monetary aneurysm staggered from the upper office downward

from the nerveless malls.

Ships rust, containers float offices into concrete weirs

We’ll find new stanchions under soaring highways, nest under rubber wings,

far from the closed malls.

High Enough

 

I can see the herds, the water at the end of the brush, the thin water.
My shoulders slump to claws, my head rests on a branch.
Am I high enough? I dreamed water, the thin water spreading,
dust drinking like an elephant, swelling until water became scale,
hide, skin--and everything began to float.
We can climb. Elephants can swim. I can carry
some smaller creatures to the upper branches.
Zebras run. 
But the guns...they come in water cars.
We have to find trees and they swim nearer and shoot us,
scoop us from the skin of the water, leave bones, 
take our dryness with them.
Even the zebras, even the elephants.
I dreamed of water and of guns.
Am I high enough?

Last night, of course, I also dreamed of invasion. We moved to a house a museum had been using as a place to host parties and people were angry that we wanted to live in the house we had bought. They banged on the door, they took pictures, they ignored the signs that said "private residence." We curled up in a bedroom you could only reach by a broken ladder, turned off all the lights, and hoped the next party would be better (while eating party food we'd scrounged). My favorite season is creeping slowly closer with the promise of true horror--nothing safe or preventable about what fall brings in train. Or it's just like the library we recently reshuffled--it had begun to loom in the room too small for the bookshelves we'd stuffed within--it's more manageable with more space. 

Hope the coming week brings lightness & a good view & writing space. Sharing with The Sunday Muse and with Poets & Storytellers United. 

-- Chrissa

Magic, Cows, and Hallows

 

I drop the phone, now a book, onto the sweater trunk.
The dogs look down, go back to snoozing.
We're at the foot of the bed, reading 50,000 feet (spacetime)
above these poems, which are about Minnesota
in the 1960s. I reach out my arms and fly
over descriptions of hatching moons,
of alcohol and blankness and yet more moon.
We come down at the end,
palms balancing on either side of the phone,
touching down in Texas, in 2020, in daylight.
I want to call from the window for a magic cow,
for a tough, unbroken fairy tale, coastal prairie rangy;
I want the calf to come back fat and forgiving, 
for it to butt against the screen and call for my husband
to remember her from high school
and for her then to trample our neighbor's fence
and beckon the dogs and I and my husband
beyond the patches of yard stitched fence to fence
all the way to the woods, all the way
to the deer run.
These fairy tales will be sturdy enough to pull a cart;
a soft career of deer through woods piped and managed
then into the sudden maze of edgelands and weeds.
A dancing cow will lead us
beyond the sun and moon.

Carrie, thanks for the second prompt! James has put the kibosh on chickens, goats, and tiny, shaggy cows in the backyard (maybe he's worried they'd all end up inside, piled on the couch with the dogs and I, watching YouTube videos about tiny houses and dead malls), so my ranch will always be fantastical. And it will feature a couch full of animals. And a mosaic tile floor. And a library/sunken den. Goats with eyeglasses? Cows writing novels in nooks? All interior/garden design by Roxanne, of course. Miss you guys & hope your week is going well. :) 

-- Chrissa

WordCrafters Wednesday Prompt

 Your Favorite Month

The climate is changing. You won't see any migrations. 
Cities don't. So it is warmer, maybe, than it used to be.
Would you notice? I'm older. The a/c  is needed
through December but the heat soaks in rather rolling
down my back. But my favorite month remains
a smudge of September shading into October. 
I believe in the sweater illustrations.
Well, they sit on the altar September creates
next to school photos and the time 
 before Halloween, when all the holidays 
are just over the horizon, a few weeks, a few days, away.
Anticipation rises like sugar, unfurling in the gut.
As moonflowers bloom on the umbrella skeleton
you'll note the large moths that don't arrive
by these illustrations in an old book of my dad's,
careful of the pages slipping away from the dried glue.
We'll keep our traditions, but the world won't.
This year, I might plant some hair
for all the grief, to grow the spirits another body
underneath the moonflowers, for ghosts ripe for 
Halloween. Or just for the vines, 
to make them easier to plait.