Chorus Blog: Happy Phantom

Chorus Blog is our opportunity as the team behind Meow Meow Pow Pow to share our interpretation of the themes we ask writers to submit work for. Here is our Chorus Blog on... "Happy Phantom." 

Acrylic Apparition, The Return - Krystle Griffin

art by the author

On a day just like this, painted gray overcasted skies that rained off and on, several canvases arrived and filled my apartment. Varying degrees of completion , styles, medium and life. The pieces of her soul left behind; her art.

One stood out. One she had barely begun to bring it to life, yet the fainted started lines stretched out and took hold. An outlined woman, reverenced in a hallway. Hands clasped.

The beginning of my brushstroke was fury. Ignited inspiration that shook from my root. I dove head first right in. I felt the canvas move me. Bewitching my fingertips in rhythmic creation. 
It was delicious kismet.

.

Held frozen in the midst of this painting, a ghost of a woman who once was started on canvas then halted. A painting over top of the ghost of an unfinished painting before, this canvas living in the corner of my kitchen, haunting me. This old piece of someone else’s history. A piece from a collection of a woman now passed. Her leftovers, now housed in my apartment. A gift from her son, a stranger to me, who just a couple months ago, stood in the middle of my living room with grief soaked air around us. Complete silence. He wished them goodbye and good luck on their future lives. They were his mother’s. An artist no longer in this realm, left behind a house full of her work. Abstract to portrait, from landscape to still life, and all throughout the seasons of her existence. Married name back to maiden, from fresh student to a skilled artist. Fifty canvases filled my apartment, brimming it to its limit. I shuffled through them one by one. Connecting and dreaming up her story. With each painting, each manipulated speck of color, I witnessed a woman whose art was embedded into her fiber. It ebbed, flowed and grew as she went through life.

A passed torched torture of artist block, now in this moment, has its grips on me. I was able to carry on her painting a little further. However, it stands frozen yet again. This painting on top of painting of a woman stilled. Alone. Perhaps she too is held in time where an unfinished piece stands in a corner. Matryoshka dolls of the past, present and future. I hold this painting close, intertwined with me as I try to carry her forward.

For now, I wait. Wait for the spark to return. For the story to come back and carry on with me. I wait for the block to be lifted so that I can set this phantom free.

.

On a day just like this, I began again. As if no time had passed, like an old friend.

I picked up a single paint and brush and started with the tiny thought of what if I placed a single stroke here. With a twist of my wrist, a swish and a flick, the spell was broken and intuition took me by surprise. Once again knowing exactly what to do. When truthfully, I simply allowed myself to get lost.

On a Thursday night, there she and I were again, in the middle of my kitchen. As the euphoria crashed over me, I found myself deeply entrenched in gratitude for the return of inspiration. I began to type out the words to a friend when a second wave knocked me breathless; the realization that the weekend to come is Mother’s Day. The air turned dense, lungs exhumed, I burst. Her presence made known. I was to finish this today.

And I did.

To all mothers in every form.
​
 With love.

ghostwalking - ​Kim ​GORANSSON

art by the author

a spoonful of salt 
on my tongue
trying to pin down 
a memory
dried out
on the window sill
next to a monstrous 
lump that was supposed to be
a potato chip
jalapeno flavored
a keepsake or
prayer
into the soft unknown

I make the same loop 
with the dogs
along the fence across 
the road 
a cop parked down there
am I walking 
casually
enough?

in the evening they pull 
harder against the leashes
so many scents throwing
in the air
seem to become 
more pronounced 
with the cold
the sun parked
beyond the chapel

in an ache
dreamy pastels
my ghost fingers
are wrinkled and sore
i’m filling pockets
with dead styrofoam

so many scents throwing
in the air
seem to become 
more pronounced 
with the cold

---

Bone Song - Jane-Rebecca Cannarella 

art by the author

There are good witches in West Virginia, summer heat transforming skin to boiled hamburger. They change into livestock, feeding the earth with bones that crumble to dust, their hair  bundled like ragweed. Every sneeze is from pollen that was once a solitary, free-range goat-- once a wild mountain witch. Death is a seafoam bubble, the mung in water, and I homesteaded South only to find that mountain bikes move differently in Appalachia. After I stumbled, the ocean frost of myself festered and burst, spilling saltwater insides to water the world below.  Crash of sound, like how the peak of a mountain looks like the crest of a wave.

When I woke, the water returned to me, and in my hand, I held the rattle of a lone goat's bone. I carried the relic North where it sang songs the whole trip back. In the silence of the city, I buried it beneath piles of office furniture in a locked closet--a cycle returned to the familiar: pressed clothes, too much coffee, a life rebuilt into what it once was. But sometimes, in the quiet, I hear the bone humming, and it sounds like blues and grass and fiddles--songs born from a wild goat who was once a very good witch.