The Cello
On nights like this I would play my cello, the snow like tinfoil under a phosphorescent moon. Before I knew it, you were there, with your handkerchiefs and your melancholia. The light on my windowpane, a struck match all aglow. We would take turns cradling the instrument’s long neck, its cavernous belly, watching the cold metal strings shiver and hum. After each chord you’d swallow glittering nerve tablets, whispering: Be still. Be. Still. Its sonorous voice faded with each blue pill. And when the snow eddied and slushed, the cello safe in its towering white box, I took up sainthood to pass the time. On winter mornings my teeth still ache.
Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, where she is currently pursuing a master's degree. She is the author
of five chapbooks of poetry and nonfiction. Her poems, reviews, and
essays have appeared or will appear in The Mid-American Review,
Rain Taxi, CutBank, Smartish Pace, Rattle, The Pedestal, Redactions: Poetry and
Poetics, and other journals. Recent awards include residencies from the
Centrum Foundation and the Mary Anderson Center for the Arts.