Upside Down Kris

Daylight The world wakes up early with us, us who aren't sleeping. It's not that we can't sleep–we just don't. Probably for different reasons, yet some are surely the same. Maybe it was enough: this pause for dreaming, this cherry plumb waltz with the fears which dance around dreams. Daylight has already made sense of my room, hazy in a gray-yellow robe. She dresses   what we know: the furniture, the promises...she colors the day to come, the thoughts that bring me into full awareness. She is not hurried, walking through the wall of cicadas, listening to their drone signaling the heat. She turns toward the coo coo of a pigeon as I perceive a conversation between seagulls. Is that possible, so far away from the sea? Through my window Daylight shimmers on the neighbors' pool in expectation of the two children who will later jump in. A motorcycle passes by their gate with its headlights still on, attesting to the night it left under the tarp at home. The two beams rele

The Vine I sit in the wooden chair flaking white, cooling my feet on the concrete wall to the side. In front of me, the grate of my balcony grates on me: or rather I should say the vine twisting around it insists on me watching its reaching.  The vine grabs onto different poles; up, up until the first horizontal bar. There it has become confused–confused but not stagnant. It continues crawling until it finds a small upward spiral of support. (Could the bar represent my current situation?) Here, all the paths from the vine's thin necks convene and overlap. They criss-cross around that call for up, a mass of hopes and needs. (Are they the same thing?) Many heads have ventured outward, spreading along a visible timeline. Some have blossomed backwards, looking to the past for support. The most surprising are those heads growing out of the tangledness under them. They turn above the mess with their heads tilted upward. The ones stretching toward the future stare straight at me. Knowing

A stroke of Lemon   (On  Ode to a  Lemon, Neruda) In slicing a lemon the pungency steals into my nose, stings my tastebuds before I can suck the tang from my juicy fingers. But if my mouth waters while savoring a poem or soaking in a painting, the author has infused it with the essence of lemon. If I perceive  the iridescence of a lemon in the tiles of a painting feeling its coolness under my fingers, then the artist has succeeded in her intent. But if I am part of the peel puckering at its sourness yet enchanted by its ruvid yellowness, then art has been reached: the climax of beauty  in its metaphor. Photo:   Engin Akyurt: https://www.pexels.com/photo/sliced-of-lemons-on-black-surface-1907644/ Text: Kristen Mastromarchi

Splash! It started out as a tinkle, the laugh that escaped my lips. Then it rolled through me as it gained confidence, releasing a chortle. I felt gleeful and mad at the same time. Maybe my partner did, too, because I could hear his responding guffaw from behind me. We had done it all wrong. The sky had forewarned us of rain, but we didn't listen. We kicked through the pool, our feet propelling around the squared out lines cut into concrete. The pool was too small to swim in, but we made the most of it seeing as how we had ridden to an adjacent town to try it out. We were surrounded by water–the water in the pool plus the molecules bursting around us. And burst they did into a full-fledged rain. My bare feet quickened to the alcove where I had left my love to peruse the grounds. So, we sat under the protection of the trees munching on banana bread. (Who brings banana bread to the pool? And then eats it with the intention of swimming afterward?) The drops squeezed around us, occasio