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.




The Death Watch Beetle


She can hear the ticking of the death watch beetle, boring through her trellis like a miniature auger. On evenings like this, the woman keeps time by the sound of snakflies grumbling across a colorless sky. And when their buzzing swells in her tired ears, she fastens the iron latch on every window, recoiling. Her house still hums with shrill opera. As she sleeps, the song grows louder and more dissonant.

Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University. 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). She has also reviewed books for The Boston Review, Modern Language Studies, New Letters, The Colorado Review, Shenandoah, Pleiades, and other periodicals. Recent awards include residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, the Centrum Foundation, and the Prairie Center of the Arts, as well as scholarships to attend the Squaw Valley Writers Conference and the Ropewalk Writers Retreat.