Once the last aria fades, a young man leans against the railing of the theatre’s grand entrance, singing fragments of Orpheus and Eurydice. He closes his eyes and the grief in each pale blue note begins to unsettle me. Alone on the sidewalk, I watch the boulevard darken. Knowing that one can’t chart the strange geographies within another, or navigate the unlit paths beneath their heart’s sleek surface. And the man still singing as the air grows cold. As days pass. His voice becomes the music tucked inside a glistening box, wound and released by memory. Every time the moon rises, its little golden key won’t stop turning.
—
Kristina Marie Darling is a graduate of Washington University, where she received both an undergraduate degree in English and a master’s degree in American Culture Studies. 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). A two-time Pushcart Prize nominee, her poems appear in such journals as Gargoyle, Miller’s Pond, Illya’s Honey, Big City Lit, and Janus Head: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies.
