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Chrissa Sandlin is poet living in Spring,
Chrissa Sandlin
Flat windows, clear blue, saffron, winking green
where the sky rests in blinks and spectra
on upside down balloons and cut glass drops
hanging like
sandbags from the afternoon.
Drop them on
the sill and give her
time to take
us backward, provisioned with
grandma's ginger cookies, emerald sugar
cast upon
their sandy shore.
She said they
reminded her of windows
broken on the
dirt of the road.
She is curled
like a tree
her hair tight
like budded cotton,
Grandma Jill,
with knitting needles
still piercing
her bun.
She tells me of the cities through which
whole squadrons marched, needles ready
past blank glass faces, like these
impassive flows, backwards fountains,
light falling
down their sides
while their green glass shot upward
like my upside
down balloons.
In her voice,
I link arms, valiant
with friends
in grass-green skirts
formal in our pride, antique in our adulthood
fired by the
banking of our youth.
She breaks me
from the spells of men,
snares my thoughts from elves, drags them
from the
dragons with romances of her pirate days
billows on the sod, a skirt that lifted
an entire body
skyward, like the martial heft of brass and winds.
It will be
otherwise for me, unskirted
slouching
silent through my peace
in the broken
plane of my adulthood.