Christina Marrocco

three poems

Winifred Fables: Collection A for Anyway

1.

Winifred Creamer sat on her own front stoop licking condensation from the sides of her iced tea glass, reflecting on the word foyer. How she’d never heard it until she was maybe fourteen. Front doors, coat closets and cellars, alleys and gangways, but no foyers. So now whenever she was forced to use the word Winifred bristled under its demand, which was to either put on False French or to say it wrong on purpose. A trap, she breathed into ice at the bottom of her glass, some real bougie bullshit, right there.

2.

Winifred swung open the kitchen cabinets and screamed in that quiet way. Grabbed a serving bowl among the pots, yanked the stock-pot from where it squatted despotic over frying pans, snatched a vegetable peeler from the silverware drawer. She culled glasses from the cups cabinet, cups from the glasses cabinet. Discovered parts of her food processor in seven separate locations. Reunited them. And when she was done, Winifred banged all the doors, slammed all the drawers. Shut.

She leaned against the hard body of the refrigerator. In through the nose. Motherfucker, what the actual motherfucking fuck? Hold. Out through the mouth. Okay. Okay. Okay, Okay, Okay. But then the glint, the hitherto missing stainless-steel colander dangling like a trapeze artist off the back of the fridge, dirty peanut butter knife thrown inside.

And so, Winifred went straight to bed, pulled the blankets over her head, stuffed a pillow corner into her mouth like kidnapping herself, and wondered if she were to run away from home, just how long until the kitchen achieved entropy.

Eleven days.

It would take eleven days, and the bathroom by comparison would go to hell in just three.

3.

Winifred sunbathed in her small backyard on an old quilt she also used for watching television with the cat and dog. It was blue and thick. How safe she felt, pulling the thick padding around herself when the sun drifted behind the clouds. Now, Winifred knew that the sun didn't really move behind the clouds, that the sun didn't move at all, at least not from the perspective of the earth. She knew the whole solar system did whatever, and in truth, it was the earth that cavorted across the sky with her and everyone else on it, riding while clouds swirled above, bits of wool caught on brambles of atmosphere. She knew all that, but Winifred preferred to hold and tend a world in which a moveable sun came forth to warm her very bones, to make her miss it when it left her.

Christina Marrocco is a poet and writer in Elgin, Illinois. Her work appears in journals such as Ovunque Siamo, Silverbirch Press, and The Laurel Review. Her forthcoming novel comprised of connected short stories will be published soon with Ovunque Siamo Press. Much of Christina's work navigates working class women's experience in multi-ethnic settings. She frequently transgresses boundaries between literary genres as a means of cracking open literary space. Christina is an associate professor of English at Elgin Community College outside Chicago, where she teaches introductory and advanced Creative Writing, Women's Literature, and more.