PROUST QUESTIONNAIRE (#1-10)Silence, seated in golden hour sun, disintegration looping along with cicada song. Reflection at the end, reckless, feckless, regrets upon each other, nothing to show save the memories lost with me. I hold myself back in hopes that others will hold me. I shouldn’t have to remind you. If only I had an answer, singular. We, all, survivors deserve applause. A bottled scent with hints of leather and hay. Wishing this could be better. Patience. But, darling, if I only told the truth, the story would be so boring. My outward appearance belies the storm inside. THE ECHOESHear them in the canyon when the day grows long and chaparral sways, the wind seductive. I could have crawled there in my linen dress had I wanted to. Instead, I sit high up on a rock just off the mountain trail. I could have been one of those women gathering flowers and herbs, the hem of my dress a basket. A stain is a reminder of life lived. I am flawless, my dress pristine. I have forgotten the mud and the chlorophyll. I have forgotten the face of my father. I have forgotten your very name. But if I were judge and jury, I would not condemn me. I have given more than I’ve forgotten, and I know the true name of the sun. We light up bright together. I am blue light. This is how fast I travel, even when sitting up high, watching your shadows move. I am a failed channel, but I will learn. Cut your tongue to spite your mouth. I take stalks of sweetgrass and weave them into a net to catch my honor. You misread that as horror. Perhaps there’s not much difference. I throttle the clouds until they weep. 15 DAYS AFTERGrief is a basket you’re expected to carry from one end of the unspooling day to the other despite hands already full, hands that pound and wrench, not grasp and hold. You want to sit down but the ground no longer exists. You float on waves as they crest and trough, your basket waterlogged. You want to put it down but the handles have been woven around your wrists. You must carry it and carry it alone. Time will diminish the basket but time is so long, time is forever, it lingers like the rope burns on your limbs. LISTENING TO OTIS REDDING AS I WAIT FOR YOUR RETURNI’m not ashamed to say my favorite music is the wind through someone else’s peach trees or the whispered reverberations of footfalls against warped wooden floorboards, but that music has ended now for good, and you are only gone temporarily, so I sit, feet on the couch, nose pressed to windowpane, a child waiting for Christmas, waiting for the miracle I was taught to believe and yet still suspect. What gift so precious would I trust to be carried overnight from Memphis to appear unbroken here by morning? And so, this old music, yours, with soul and melisma and vinyl crackle. I count your absence by how many times I turn the record over. I doubt that Otis could understand this ache carving its way through my flesh, but my god, I bet he’d give it a try. HOW TO WRITE A POEM (#13)Put on Miles Davis to stave off the loneliness listening gives the feeling the ability to pretend you are someone else living another life. Your poetry is too specific too driven by your own limited scope. A poet needs to live and you spend all your time dying. Do you think Frank ever felt sorry for himself? Or do you think he stole away in the golden hour with a slice of watermelon a cold beer and a comic book to the river and sat and ate and drank and read? You could fuck three women in a row if you wanted. You could drink whiskey from a teacup. The only thing holding you back is this sense of self, a misconception. You’re not a poet yet because you’ve still not learned how to breathe. HOW TO WRITE A POEM (#7)It’s the sleeve of your favorite button-down shirt, the one with the moon-stain on it from the night you walked all the way to the coast. The causeway was empty, so empty you could hear the shuddered whispers of everyone who had ever stepped foot in that sand there by the interstate. You could hear the sunburns and the cans of beer chilling in Igloo coolers and the people being seen and having what they believed to be fun. You didn’t believe in fun. You believed in quick bursts of movement only when necessary and Spica in Virgo and the curse your rising sign bestowed upon you. NEW GALILEE, PARoute 168 cuts through New Galilee. I drive it five days before Christmas, my first without my father, and the first day of sun all weekend, an extended golden hour. The aureate glow should be soothing. Around every bend I expect a pickup truck, a cadre of motorcycles, lying in wait to surround me, rend me, force me from my rented Toyota Corolla. No one makes their presence known. Anyway, I have no one to save me. There are no houses for sale in New Galilee though you can buy 30 barren acres for the price of a single Tampa lot. Is this a bargain when no one wants to live here? It is not home, but it is not much different: undulating, forgotten land, a memory of nothing. A deflating blowup Grinch in a Santa Hat, a string of multicolored lights half burnt out, the autobody shop shilling custom exhaust systems, its marquee asking, How Wild Is Enough? Let me be the judge. I just keep driving on. Later I learn there is a photo submitted on Google for New Galilee: a bench beneath a streetlight, night’s chewy darkness a cloak thrown around its shoulders. On YouTube this would be called a liminal space, a robotic voice narrating the void, the echo of a life lived, a person sitting at one time but no longer. I wish it were me and mine; however, never again could I live under a winter’s ruthless regime. I allow myself to wade into the reverie: buying those 30 acres and settling a fatherless land. Praying to the trees in New Galilee and emptying myself of myself. Shae Krispinsky lives in Tampa, FL, where she fronts the band, Navin Avenue, whose sound she describes as Southern Gothic 70s-arena indie rock with a pop Americana twist. Her fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry have appeared in Connotation Press, Thought Catalog, The Dillydoun Review, Vending Machine Press, Sybil Journal and more. She is currently working on her band's second album and a novel.
You can find her on Instagram at: https://www.instagram.com/dearwassily/.
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