A Weed on The Curb

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #244 . Photo Manipulation by Artist Okan Ozel This picnic takes place in the rain. Tomatoes, cheese, and ash.  Wear your lies pave', rhinestoned. Your sandwich rests on the tracks. This discordant grill whistles on, to crush the coins you need to pass. Five chords born backboned, already crumpled to cash.  Is it wrong that I've been watching craft videos lately (painting, sewing, etc.) and am now thoroughly jealous of the idea that some  projects can be filmed and completed in a week? I'd like to be able to do that with the novella I'm currently working on...one week to transform an idea from scribbled in a notebook to printed in a book, all shiny and ready to be read. Tune in next week for Notebook to Novella! -- Chrissa  

  Sharing with   The Sunday Muse #243 . The writer in my head is never honest. He sits back, pokes a memory...sighs. Reassures me it's completely meaningless. He grabs a sheaf of ideas, fans them out: Detritus. High school? Offices before social media? One by one, he feeds them into the fire. Briefly, he stares into the flames, Shakes his head, tilts back, stares at the ceiling. He's stuck in a ready room.  In a skull. He could make fifteen different novels At least one deathless sword-and-sorcery series Out of this--he'd be the wizard. The fire crumples the paper, petals it. A vase of charcoal, fiery blooms. Boring . Burn the worst, the best. He's a liar, a fabulist, a critic, with a sorcerous talent for disparagement.  Greetings and salutations!  Thanks for the kind wishes toward Merlin, who has been doing well this week, alternating between super bouncy (is there food potentially available? new people around?) and his natural pillow state (see below). -- Chri...

 Sharing with The Sunday Muse #242 . They will dress me in the tiles that fall If they leave me dressed at all They will say I was place apart Where commerce deep-fried art   Once, they called my children rats They sneer past my collapse They forget themselves in me I took and sold their stories. Jim, your post from last week really stuck in my head and inspired a short novella about a mannequin that decided she'd prefer apotheosis to recycling...which means malls and stores are still fermenting in the back of my head.  Merlin has been suffering from seasonal allergies this past week, which meant he was at the vet yesterday and today is snoozing off his medicine (and all the salmon treats he's been given... bacon of the sea, bacon of the sea, swimming with the fishes so deliciously !) and enjoying the cool & not rainy weather.  Sending good & cozy wishes! -- Chrissa 

This past year hasn't been a struggle so much as it has been one of those years--none of the edges quite met up and, toward the end, I felt all the strings pulling themselves out of my hands. I think I need a briar-wall season to get myself back together.  Good night, Chrissa

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #241 . I only daydream when you're driving I am the flood of memory When the guilt gets rocked to sleep I pop the bubbling thought Jarred from the dark, familiar street Waiting impatiently on the seeds that will begin to repair a backyard scoured by a hard freeze without frost. Hoping that the Mouse Melon Tower will produce many melons (good with avocado) and that we'll have cucumber salad throughout the summer. We're also going to try for moonflowers and tiny white pumpkins on the skeleton of an old patio umbrella (which would be really cool but the moonflowers didn't come up last year and squash are always trouble here so...) and yet more squash around the plant stand.  Hope you're having a great start to the new year! -- Chrissa

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #240 , poetry in the midwinter pause. Art by Michael Whelan Still angry at the bauble, the key to the vanished door Kept on a shelf as an inert memory, as dust-flavored time No one said we kept possibility just out of reach At least of the less-brave children, who never walked a shelf Or touched a bone or glass or a universe key But still, somehow, were wiser for their walk on this shore Than I have been making this discovery There is a not-insignificant part of me that would love to take this and make of it a novel in between the holidays, to create something out of that gorgeous painting. However, that may just be a brain freeze from standing in my stocking feet on the driveway while James strung Christmas lights over the front bed he'd just massacred and was feeling slightly guilty about. Sorry about the salvia. Have some Christmas lights. :)  front bed In my head, the reindeer is about to eat his way through the candy cane li...

  Sharing with The Sunday Muse #239 , a weekly poetry & flash site. Come share! The doves and mockingbirds knit the fog into socks and coats for those who walk the bridge over the ocean the land remembers glittering in rainbows, refractions; light bends infinity into all her bridges under which we pass. Welcome to second (third?) summer, much like the multiple meals of a wealthy hobbit, in which we have exceeded the pleasant sufficiency of warm weather and are filling in all the chilly corners. Is it time to convert all Christmas decorations to holiday at the beach? Sandmen and pelicans? Did I pick the wrong picture for this week's Muse? :) Hoping you're having a good week! -- Chrissa