Craft & Play Vol. 58

Dear friends,

Whenever I wear jeans outside, it gets too hot, and I start sweating. I changed into a dress, but my air conditioned house is too cold. At night, the comforter smothers me, and I wake up at 3 am, but the flat sheet leaves me feeling exposed. Recently, our car air conditioner broke, and my husband plugged in a tower fan in our Dodge Caravan. I struggled to keep it upright while cruising down the highway, and the thermostat reads 38 degrees. Such is the apocalypse of summer. We are nearing the end of the lushness and green. Leaves in the forest are turning yellow. My mood ring changes from brown to orange. Every other day I drink hot tea, just to see if I can finish it before the morning warms me up too much. And every day, I write, sweat on my brow or blanket wrapped around my shoulders.

As you have seen from last week’s post, this month’s theme is Mood Ring. A few months ago, I went to a gift shop and found a mood ring, the kind I have always coveted after watching Vada wearing one in My Girl. What a rollercoaster of a movie that was. One minute you cringe, another you laugh, then unexpectedly you sob on the couch, your 9 year old self not yet understanding the gravity of losing a friend. So this month’s theme is Mood Ring, where we let color drive our emotions, or our emotions run into a color. Feeling bone heavy on the couch while watching the world go by? Black. Feeling like climbing Mount Everest? Orange.

For Craft & Play, today we are writing a poem about a color, without using the color’s name at all!

Instructions:

1. Choose a color

2. Write down items, adjectives, places, anything you can think of that makes you think of that color.

3. Write sets of couplets using the things you’ve written down.

4. Cut the couplets out and move them around on your desk, and fill in the gaps so that your poem flows smoothly.

5. Let it sit, revise, and share it with us if you want!

For our poem, we each wrote separate sets of couplets and then combined them to make a poem. We chose the color green.

There Must Be More in the Iris
A holocaust of grass lays flat in the field,
bleached white by the merciless heat,
that even thistles bow low to the ground,
petals stuck out like tongues reaching
for a drop of water. How many weeks has it been
without rain? When your answer to prayer is more wind
tearing the walls of cedars and ponderosa trees,
hands stripping a bird of its feathers—flame of fire.
A housefly buzzes in my ear, the shimmer
of its body blazing like a gemstone. I swat it.
Then, I stretch across the bed, languid,
morose, my stomach turning sickly,
it has always been like this: house, fly,
winged corpse on the windowsill, a new one
buzzing when the day blinks into life once more.
There must be more in the iris of the universe,
where pastures are nothing but algae blooming
and bite marks in the path you left for me. I wake, and
a  soft dew drop sleeps on a leaf, cold and cool.
I watch through the window till the sun sips it into the air.

Here is a sneak peek of this month’s zine:

May you all have a blessed weekend!

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For our paid subscribers, this month’s zine, Mood Ring, is available for download below.