Author: Collette
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Mother.
As the day comes to a close, I watch the clouds settle in over the mountains and I can’t help but think how everything about them speaks Mother: Soft, pink, and all-encompassing. Able to drape her soft body around even the mightiest masterpieces until all is shrouded in the delicate mist of her touch. She…
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Where Words are Born
I want dark frayed linen and mismatched china on the windowsill. Woolen socks drying on the line in early morning, meandering fog and dried nailed lavender above the sink. I want stone hues, silk scarves that always seem to stay put, and the slow drip of a copper faucet. People walking bikes along the path…
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Only and Everything.
It is August of two thousand twenty one. I am rocking my daughter to sleep, listening to the sound of uninterrupted life that comes from our company on the other side of the door. Good, hearty laughter, the ringing of wine glasses, and the passing of bread. I count the seconds until she is asleep…
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No, Artists Don’t Have a Creative “Sixth-Sense.”
When my daughter was a newborn, I’d wake up in the middle of the night just a few moments before she would. From perfect sleep, my eyes would flicker open to the dark silence of a still room. Then, after a minute or two, my daughter’s little body would sidle back and forth, and she’d…
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Nashville.
Some things are too terrible to feel. Somewhere in the deepest, most primitive part of the brain, a spark is lit; a mechanism switches on. The brain turns one palm out, and wraps the other around the heart. Do something. Everyone is screaming at the sky, their voices a choir of unharmonious clamor. Lips curl…
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The Race of Faithfulness
I’m reading my book. Not as in, my book of the month, one I pulled off the shelf at the charming but over-priced bookstore on Main Street. (Yes, my town has a true-blue Main Street, that is in fact the main street on which to be). I’m reading my book. I’ve finished my novel, you…
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People My Age Aren’t Having Children.
I’ve heard peers say that children mean the end of a life. I close my eyes, hoping she will mirror me. I think of all the things I would have been doing two years ago, before she came. In the sea of white noise, there is a gentle brushing on my hand as the tiny…
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The Moon and Me
She slaps a hard blade of ice white light across my eyes, peeking in from the highest corners of my bedroom windows. “Let me be,” I tell her. “Don’t you know I am old? Of the earliness of babes? How a husband’s lunch won’t pack itself?” “You used to sit with me,” she says. “You used to sit with me and…
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Year in Review: My Word for 2022
“Pshhhhhew.” My daughter’s tiny hand soared slowly in front of my face as she mimicked the fireworks she was witnessing for the first time. I watched her, baffled by her absolute lack of fear. She gets that from her father. I wrapped my arms around her a little tighter and closed my eyes, the artillery…
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Should Everyone Like Your Work?
“YOU!” The stranger shouted at me from across the room. I was standing in a dark, seedy bar off Magazine Street in New Orleans, with stone floors older than some American cities, the slick grease of a thousand good nights under my stilettos. “Me?” I pointed at myself; my other hand busy keeping my ballgown…
THE CARTRIDGE 