Chrissy Stegman

Bad Historian of Happier Days

Monday. The moon cosplayed me on Monday. I want to read a letter to myself but I am future-caged. Just some golumpki someone made once upon a time for someone in my bloodline. Tuesday. Nothing happened. Wednesday. I’ve become ashes or a dream of ashes or something that once happened. I overheard: Two weeks ago, there were crazy people out there, & I said: Are these people manic? I look up now on this Wednesday & what’s left is a tin can of the sky. Just my son’s feet next to mine & we are reading. It’s Thursday & I do not believe in prayer. I do believe in tenderness because it’s like a stoned dream. I see Jupiter above Venus below a crescent moon at the bluest hour. I must stop asking where the low entropy of the sun will take me. Friday. Someone says, No more talking. I agree. Saturday. I consider the things we might find in the junk drawer of a mind. I imagine the Ship of Theseus but it’s just dad jokes told by me to my youngest son. (This page is dimly lit.) A pile of feathers & Apollo in pursuit of Daphne without a moment’s pause. Sacred offerings & spiritual fires. An old pear tree blooming early in the shame of its blossoms – a pink hypnotic S marking its provisional existence. I’m sorry. I didn’t think I could, followed by one spaghetti Western painting above a grandfather’s chair, a coal stove with(out) warmth. The blood of a firefly & I am anointing my eyes when I am 9 & flare a mental image of myself running with a still life painting of fruit & a gun to my head while I flee with some Taco Bell in a paper bag from 1993. All three of my children & the understanding that they have never been afraid of me. It’s Sunday morning at 3:03 AM. Every cry has been counted. It’s being immolated by the spices of your ancestors. There is a secret heaviness at the head of a pin, but that heaviness also belongs to the kingfisher as it dives.

Author Reading

About the Author

Chrissy Stegman’s work has been featured in various journals, most recently Rejection Letters and Gone Lawn. Her work is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Anti-Heroin Chic, and Fictive Dream. She is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Bibby Idyllwil`d Arts scholarship for poetry and placed second for the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland.