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 |  my entries for the Construct Cup |
It's that time again. Time when I lose all sense of proportion and sanity and agree to write a poem a day following prompts exactly as given by our fearless leaders (aka Ren the Klutz!  and fyn  . I may not survive. But I will do it anyway, mostly because I can't imagine anyone having this much agony fun without me. Come join us! We have cookies. And possibly, straitjackets.
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| It is next week, and I wake before my alarm at what my phone tells me is way too early in the morning. But I can’t go back to bed because it is Christmas and my back aches with helping Santa until roughly four hours ago. In our house, Santa leaves the ribbons to be tied and curled under the tree so they don’t get crushed in his bag. The last part of Christmas Eve is sitting with my sisters under the tree, curling and tying as fast as we can go, and then arranging the gifts so that wrapping paper is evenly distributed. We don’t have children with us this morning. Just four adults sleeping (or waking) in three rooms, waiting until it’s time to come downstairs and have breakfast. When we were children, impatience dictated Christmas morning, but there were rules. Only the youngest could wake up the house, and that child had to wake naturally. Which meant, as the oldest, I spent hours at a time, sitting on the floor of my sister’s room, trying to stare her awake. It almost never worked. I check my phone again, but it still isn’t nearly time for a civilized breakfast. But lying in bed isn’t helping. I stand, gather clothes together—including Christmas socks and a shirt that’s both comfortable and photogenic—and head for the shower. Ten minutes later, the phone still hasn’t marked dawn. I head downstairs with my knitting to take my insulin and wait some more. We have only minimally decorated this year. No children to be disappointed. With a Christmas movie playing softly, I knit and wait for my phone to acknowledge it’s time for people to be awake. I think of my brother and sisters. In Germany, the morning must be nearly over with gifts unwrapped and breakfast finished. In California, the children are probably waking their bleary eyed parents. In Alabama, with their daddy in the kitchen making cinnamon rolls, the children might be in the middle of the morning’s unveiling. Upstairs, my baby sister is still sleeping or maybe not asleep yet. And my parents won’t wake until they’re good and ready. I sit and knit, trying to finish my advent scarf that I’ve worked on since the day after Thanksgiving. It’s nearly finished, a complicated creation of lace and twisted stitches and cables that evoke angels and bells and holly and other Christmas symbols. I knit while on the television, actors sing and pretend to fall in love and my phone blinks closer and closer to the time when they will stir upstairs and come down and meet me around the tree for our own unwrapping of presents. word count: 448 timepiece: phone outside, an imagined rooftop clatter a jingle of bells wakes me, with no hope of return—Christmas morning begins as midnight rolls away and parents finish their wrapping and ribbons a few hours before children scream “Santa came!” no children here, but my mind runs with memories of Christmas past— waiting for blue eyes to open so mayhem can commence, and although my phone tells me that dawn has hours to come, I can’t sleep. all over the world, my family is waking, children entering the same cycle of enthusiasm while parents yawn—I can almost see them, as I scroll their pictures on my phone— Germany. Alabama. California. the dancers are different, the dance is the same. and me. waiting for adults to wake, working one last project as Christmas links us. so close. so far away. line count: 32 timepiece: phone Prompt ▼ |
| I cried when they left me— seven souls in a big blue van heading east again while I stayed behind. I was eighteen. I wanted college. I even wanted to be so far away, but watching them go I remembered how much I’d miss them—Mama and Daddy. Joyce and Rachel, Lorenzo and Madeline, and Rose. she was only two, learning new words and living at a run. so sweet. would she even remember me? six months is an eternity for a young woman who never had been away from home for more than a week. but our family road trip was in July, and coming home to fly away in September? so we drove through mountains and canyons, visiting family and singing the bickering away, and when we reached my aunt, I stayed. they left. and I would be gone until Christmas. I wrote often, but Rose— too small to read. I drew pictures of my life. my dorm room, the mountain, the cafeteria where I took my meals with a thousand other freshmen who became familiar—almost family. but not quite. midterms. Thanksgiving with my aunt. finals. then Christmas and home on a plane with a layover in Denver that lasted hours longer than it should have while the plane experienced issues and I couldn’t rest for aching— their absence was like the hole left by a pulled tooth. wrong. painful. in those days, they could meet me at the gate—seven souls standing in a group, waiting for me to clear it so they could descend on me with hugs and conversations started and overlapping, a familiar music—and I was whole again, but when I bent to Rose, she shrank away. I brushed it off as though it didn’t hurt, and we headed home, Rose staring at me as though I were a stranger through baggage claim and into the car where someone else took the seat that once was mine, and the city was dark and cold in the hour it took to get home, and my room had been changed because I didn’t live there anymore, and home felt wrong—like trying on someone else’s shoes, until Rose reached up and touched my face and smiled, and I was home for Christmas. line count: 75 Prompt ▼ |
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