Skip to main content

Voice

 Sharing today with The Sunday Muse #219. 


Blow the story over me, the last one, the first one;
there's mustard and olive loaf sandwich left
and the day isn't as hot as it will be. 
Bless the day in Philadelphia when she moved,
before the ballet recital, after the record
when the wind was high as summer.
She'll always blaspheme Texas, it's the hell
that took her silk for denim, took her 
balance for kids and hurricanes.
Bless yourself when you sneeze, snotty thing
all I'm telling you, under fairy skirts,
what dance you're named after.
Bored on the grass of this new park? Think--
I could be famous, and you could be
meeting a queen of guitar screams.
Believe those come with tutu and crinoline?
Let me pull that fey illusion, quick,
don't leave bandages on belief too long.
Belly up to the table and lean close. Texas ain't
the good court. It's too scarlet prideful
and every string here shrieks.
But really--queens get to scream when they will.
Loud as you can, girl. Take these shades.
Tell'em who gave you them. Yell.

Spending the weekend hovering over a story and feeling as if sadness is the warm wind flying me too high to reach the page. It's not a specific thing...just a mid-summer slump that's sent me back to the pages of favorite books and new stories, in the mood for haunted houses to lure my own spooks out.

-- Chrissa

Comments

  1. Carrie BurttJuly 17, 2022 at 5:23 AM

    Writers must spread the word like condiments. This is a poem that speaks, whispers, and yells my friend. This Texas summer has been brutal, stay cool as best you can. I have a feeling my next light bill is going to be brutal too!!

    ReplyDelete
  2. qbitJuly 17, 2022 at 1:43 PM

    I really like this poem. "Blowing the story over me" like a much-needed breeze and spreading the ideas like seeds. And this: "Bless yourself when you sneeze, snotty thing" - fabulous.

    ReplyDelete
  3. FireblossomJuly 17, 2022 at 3:16 PM

    Maybe she will find a way to merge the two selves?

    ReplyDelete
  4. kaykualaJuly 17, 2022 at 9:57 PM

    It has been just as hot and just 'as brutal' over here in the tropics. Climate change is slowly showing its mark and it is not that welcomed. Beautiful write Chrissa!

    Hank

    ReplyDelete
  5. HelenJuly 18, 2022 at 2:12 PM

    Chrissa, this is outstanding. I honestly do not believe you are capable of 'slumping' ~ ever.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Susie ClevengerJuly 21, 2022 at 9:40 AM

    I love this whole poem." But really--queens get to scream when they will.
    Loud as you can, girl. Take these shades. Tell'em who gave you them. Yell." Your ending makes me permission to let go and yell. I so need to.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Treacle Season

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #190 ,  hosted this week by Carrie. Keaton was great in that show—the one with wings— Where he was constantly a [man]child on a ledge  dreaming an angel who became a superhero.   She was a sarcastic (fake?) angel—it was the 80s— But always good, on time, her lessons easy, Easy as it would have been for him to fall.   The metaphor so obvious...but I didn't get it. Nor the easy and obvious good. (/s)   I watch the TV movie every other December Remembering believing in easy And crushing on this character, that city...   Angels should be sweet, sarcastic figures, knowing (like nurses and social workers) we prefer Sleeping on the ledge, reckless to call for "heroes." To clear up any confusion:  there is no Michael Keaton movie we watch every holiday season. Although, if there were...I'd probably watch it.  -- Chrissa
16 comments
Read more

Turn Away

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse , for #193. Turn away, like the moon, listening... Listening to the planet that rumbles with a hundred million slaps. All the feet, all the rockets, all the  pistons in the cars on the asphalt over the chasm where the veins run deep, blue in sunlight, black at night. Running over the chasm.  Once or twice they ran to you. Once or twice they ran by. Greetings and salutations. The sky is an entertaining shade of concrete yellow as the rain promised earlier in the week makes good on its arrival. It's a disturbing bright sallow sky, the kind of sky that puts you in mind of old movies and degraded film stock and the pops and crackles incidental to the main story.  Several years ago I made a resolution to journal more and last year I came across a video that suggested I actually re-read those journals, at least those of the previous year, at the beginning of each new year. Technically, I have kept the journal resolution, making daily notes in the margins of
15 comments
Read more

Revelations

 Sharing with The Sunday Muse #169 : It takes time for the quest to settle into your calves, to work through your soles and up to your shoulders, spreading through nerve and vessel until  you can't go home because you've already left something of yourself there. You can't be in two places at once. You remember vacations but now you think your family's plans probably resembled some supervillain's monologue:  we'll do this and then take them here. It'll be fun. When do you leave the house on time? Who's time? There's a collar of dead bushes at the lawn in front of the gas station, a tiny, grassy patch of the suburbs beyond, ruins of landscaping, bright, dead. Two years ago feels like twenty, feels loud, a power wash of wind through the window; roaring down the dry sewers that funnel a/c through the lawns and backwards, carrying dreams dry and sharp. At this speed, everything cuts as it passes. Appendix 1:  Chrissa is Full of Stuff and Nonsense Let'
13 comments
Read more