Bar Napkin Musings

I broke up with the sun today and decided to spend the rest of my days with the moon because I don't speak sunshine and because words hurts less in the dark when they get washed out to sea before they ever have a chance to become castles and because I don't need those castles or those walls or those kings gleaming in the midday sun to tell me where I don't belong

~ VoodooRue, September 2023

A Memory

We are fighting in the backseat as usual my brother and I are fiesty, territorial children arguing over the invisible middle line across the backseat of a brown Ford Pinto (that would at one point carry us all the way to a family vacation in Maine without spontaneously combusting) on the way to a maybe-once-a-month family dinner at the Mountain View Diner

We battle over backseat territory

while my dad whistles along to

Ronnie Milsap's Smoky Mountain Rain

(my dad could have won a whistling championship, if such a thing

had existed among poor folk in

rural Pennsylvania in the '70s)

while my parents

chat casually about

how it feels like it's going to rain

The diner has a dining room

attached to the diner part

it's carpeted and advertises a

"smorgasboard"

(I don't know what that is)

and an organ player

who will sometimes

if I ask nicely

play a song

for the little red-haired girl

I order spaghetti and meatballs

every time

and eat it like an animal

lifting heaping forkfulls of

dangling spaghetti into the air

and lowering them into my mouth

like a tiny

tomato-painted savage

my family is embarrassed

every time

and I am unbothered by that

On the way home

it does start to rain

and I'm not sure which parent

was right about the rain

but my dad is now

whistling along to

Looking for Love

in All the Wrong Places

and I wonder how they found it

and how many wrong places

they had to look for it

and if they ever really found it at all

and if I ever really would

~VoodooRue, February 2024

For Mom

A quiet sidewalk fracture catches my mother one evening after dinner a silent summer sacrifice to the sidewalk gods of Dauphine Street

A knee makes contact

and the bleeding begins

as a straw hat tumbles to the ground

It's July of 1999 and

there aren't many people here

It's hot and exhausting

and who even comes here in July?

Besides us

An after-dinner white knight appears

another tourist

to carry the broken sacrifice

back to her hotel

while the sidewalk stain remains

My mother

is four years older then

than I am now

and my knees are terrified

of sidewalks everywhere I go

and what kind of sacrifice

they expect from me

My mother

doesn't get to take something away

without leaving something behind

In the end, how much will I owe?

~ VoodooRue, April 2023

Untitled

When I was a kid

I used to think that the sky

over the city

and the sky

over the country

were not the same sky

because I didn't think that the two

could exist in the same universe

I didn't think that neon

could exist in the same universe

as starlight

And now I just can't decide

if I'm neon or starlight

and how bright

I am meant to shine

~VoodooRue, August 2022