Poetry By Chrissy Stegman

Paul VanDerWerf CC




Every Time Someone Reads This Ghazal, I Reluctantly Spear the Dragon

On Michaelmas, I am the saintly mother and I finally slay my dragon. 
(The dog, the cat, my children, too, but mostly the dragon.)

On the evening of my Sainthood, I throw wide every door to let out suffering.
In Dallastown, in golden light, there is finally a spear inside the dragon.

I am a wife in a dirty apron kneading to feel something softer. More flour than bread,
I wipe my hands on apron: Does she have time to slay a dragon?

I once was a wife who is a mother who knows she can’t express suffering to children.
So I pricked my finger on the spear each night to remind myself of the dragon.

At the market, I claim an apple from inside a wicker basket.
Above it, a chalkboard reads: apples red, apples red. (Color of the dragon.)

A gaunt store clerk walks his hands across a bloody apron: The butcher is working overtime
cutting meat for the women. I can see them waiting, smoking like the dragon.

I am not ashamed by the thought of the apple in my red coat’s pocket.
I smile for the camera at the automatic door and remember not to feed the dragon.

Memory: Baptist church in third grade. I’m at the well and cusping on woman.
In white robes we are told to pray to God. And I am remembering my dragon.

Pastor was kind about prayer and said our words could be anything to Heaven.
Say the words from your heart. Can God hear me inside the belly of this dragon? 

Chrissy, I remember you in those years. I used a photograph of us to remember.
80s perm of our hair in September air, caught in maple red, waiting for the dragon.
​




Conversion

The clang of grief stopped.
Only the sparrows left
murmurs on the curve
of my breath.

I see a tanager in scarlet dress.
She carries with her thimbles of sound
her lexicon an offering

air-drunk and spilling into
the hopeful grass.

But my eyes cannot be troubled
with every green fire of blade,

as if abundance is a language
that can fall to oblivion.

A bird’s shadow, dark
as the deepest jade, eclipses me. I am
carved away from the sun. Here comes

the flare. Do you see it?
It is threading G-d’s light
through my body of glass.

​

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Chrissy Stegman is a poet/writer from Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has been featured in various journals, most recently Rejection Letters, Gone Lawn, and forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine. She is the recipient of the 2022 Patricia Bibby Idyllwild Arts scholarship for poetry and placed second for the 2022 Ellen Conroy Kennedy Poetry Prize. She is a 2023 Best of the Net Nominee.