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Some odd swing thing

Sun swarms, you know, in trumpet bells. It’s mad like snow storms in springtime. ‘Jazz night?’
      So Stella sang memories and allowed them to bump into each other. She remembered what she learned in theory: “It is about control and manipulation. It is not about kissing the sky.” Sure, she believed it. Believed it in her belly and in the whites of her eyes. Saw it in the light in the bell of a trumpet. Sun swarms more inside than outside. Sun doesn’t kiss the sky, sun is the sky, looming like an unexpected airplane in your peripheral, spontaneous like children who leap up during concerts and run up and down banisters, who scribble in notebooks during church, who build miniature snow men in spring-snow-time recess. It’s more than a ritual.                                                                                                      
                     Space is provocative too.
There’s depth in the night, in the dark nebulas. In the mystery of not-knowing and the knowing of no mystery. Misery is no joke but Stella laughed when she came home to no daughter and no refrigerator—the frig smelled like limes they said, sour, the tenants had to empty it because her cinnamon rolls molded. ‘It’s whatever,’ she sighed.
     Her home is shaped round like a bell—round with a point like the nice nose of a spring-snow-man dripping. It’s a nice house by itself, but she tries not to look around when she comes home from a gig. The houses on either side are abandoned. Each had her own little death and should have passed on, but they hang on like limp moth wings. Her house is withered flesh, holding them together. 
     God bless our home.
     The children have gone and left this small town—gone to be near the sea or something. Sun lives near the sea too and rises in rose form. Its petals stretch up like long, lingering giraffe necks—dark tongues kissing dark nebulas, kissing the sky, sky scheming. Foxes sometimes venture into her yard and tilt their heads. So does she, singing some odd swing thing.
     This city died and should be gone. Stella sits cross legged, limp, holding it together, the remnant of a glory city in the dark brown coat of a darling.‘I need a break,’ she sometimes whispers to the trumpet player who takes over,screaming sunshine for a tune.



 

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