Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master's degree in American Culture Studies. Eight chapbooks of her work have been published, among them Fevers and Clocks (March Street Press, 2006), The Traffic in Women (Dancing Girl Press, 2006), and Night Music (BlazeVox Books, 2008). Her full-length collection Night Songs was released by Gold Wake Press, 2010.
"I WAS LIT AS IF FROM THE INSIDE"
But the room stayed dark. I'd noticed the cellist's luminous cufflinks, the uncanny whiteness of his shirt. As the concert ended, I heard nothing but his music, & the cold night pulled each silver pin from her hair. That was when the curtain fell. The audience could only murmur before its folds of dusty velvet. Outside, the evening had been opened like a black umbrella.
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.
THE MUSICIAN CONSIDERS MODERNITY AND HE SIGHS
THE MUSICIAN CONSIDERS MODERNITY AND HE SIGHS
The city has turned into a mechanical city, he observes one morning, a tiny ballerina spinning inside a glistening box. Beyond the window, his wife seems adrift under the trellis's dank foliage, her steps measured with a strange precision. And even the chain on his wristwatch rattles with diminutive elegy. But when the moon rises that evening, every radio fades, and the streetcars vanish like wooden birds retreating into a great antique clock. The discotheque holds its breath in deference.