Author: Christina's Words

“The darkness around us is deep.” ~ William Stafford

“This Morning” by Jo McDougall

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

As I drive into town
the driver in front of me
runs a stop sign.
A pedestrian pulls down his cap.
A man comes out of his house
to sweep the steps.
Ordinariness
bright as raspberries.

I turn on the radio.
Somebody tells me
the day is sunny and warm.
A woman laughs

and my daughter steps out of the radio.
Grief spreads in my throat like strep.
I had forgotten, I was happy, I maybe
was humming “You Are My Lucky Star,”
a song I may have invented.
Sometimes a red geranium, a dog,
a stone
will carry me away.
But not for long.
Some memory or another of her
catches up with me and stands
like an old nun behind a desk,
ruler in hand.

“This Morning” by Jo McDougall from Dirt. © Autumn House Press, 2001.

“Tangerine” by Christy Anna Jones

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry9 Comments

Stop.
Dry your eyes
go sit on the porch
in your favorite rocking chair
the one that reminds you of
tangerines and peach ice cream
of Nina Simone and mandolins
of her.

Drink in your sorrow from a paper cup
and watch as the sinking sun
slips away into an infinite pool
of cloud and sky.
Streaks of orange and red as rich as the
over-ripe peaches you would pick
with her
for ice cream.

Look into your cup
see the deep orange swirl of the sorrow you drink.
Notice the taste on your tongue
sweet like a juicy tangerine.
Feel the evening breeze against the fine hair on
your bare arms and
on your sun-kissed shoulders.
Breathe in
and then let it go.

See the breeze blow specks of orange and gold
like tangerine dust
into the world around you.
Look into your cup of sorrow,
once full, now empty.
The air smells sweet
like Tupelo honey and sunshine
like mandolins and peach ice cream
like tangerines.

Does she still remember times like these?

 

* “Tangerine” by Christy Anna Jones via The Voices Project.

 

“Tangerine” by Led Zeppelin

“Her, Her, Her” by Caitlyn Siehl

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry2 Comments

She is a year ago.
She is the ache in the empty,
the first time you changed your mind
and the last time you were sorry about it.
She is a city sleeping beside you,
warm and vast and familiar, streetlights
yawning and stretching,
and you have never. You have never.
You have never loved someone like this.
She is your first stomach ache.
Your first panic attack and your
favorite cold shower.
A mountain is moving somewhere
inside of you, and her handprints are all over it.
Here. Here. Here, you love her.
In the fractured morning, full of
too tired and too sad, she is the first
foot that leaves the bed.
She is the fight in you, the winning
and the losing battle
floating like a shipwreck in your chest.
When they ask you what your favorite moment is,
You will say Her.
You will always say Her.

~ Caitlyn Siehl, “Her, Her, Her”

“Letter to a Lost Friend” by Barbara Hamby

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry
There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened
              between us, like ostyt, which can be used
for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room,
              and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet,
which is to want something so much over months
              and even years that when you get it, you have lost
the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky,
              “It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.”
What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face
              and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left
the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights
              at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men,
who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young
              and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote
all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke
              in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books
everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné,
              so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia,
I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves,
              feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins,
neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends
              are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’,
and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved
              for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin,
a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books
              and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes
close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding
              the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.

Source: Poetry (January 2013).

*

Eleni Mandell – “Dear Friend”

“My Dead Friends” by Marie Howe

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

I have begun,
when I’m weary and can’t decide an answer to a bewildering question

to ask my dead friends for their opinion
and the answer is often immediate and clear.

Should I take the job? Move to the city? Should I try to conceive a child
in my middle age?

They stand in unison shaking their heads and smiling—whatever leads
to joy, they always answer,

to more life and less worry. I look into the vase where Billy’s ashes were —
it’s green in there, a green vase,

and I ask Billy if I should return the difficult phone call, and he says, yes.
Billy’s already gone through the frightening door,

whatever he says I’ll do.

“My Dead Friends” by Marie Howe, from What the Living Do. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.