Kim Salinas Silva
The Singing Girl
A blue-colored lass curls her legs upon the face of a single pink daisy, spread open like a platform. One large eye gazes out like an apple; her black hair curls like a comma. A bird keeps the flower aloft; it is the stem. Her yellow dress pours like a puddle on the flower. With her is the girl’s play pretty, a baby dinosaur. He says give me, give me. Ah, ah, pointing to its mouth. Give me sugar flowers, cotton candy. A cross-eyed boy’s head hangs suspended like a moon that has fallen out of socket. Longing for comfort, he floats near the girl. But something’s wrong. Without him knowing, she has stolen his Buddhist thoughts. She uses them to nourish her flower bird. Since she has taken all his goodness, he now thinks nothing but terrible thoughts. He would really like to destroy her small dinosaur, for she loves it so. A demon has landed on his head, big as a butterfly. His claws grip the boy’s head. The cross-eyed boy doesn’t move. What is that music? Now the girl has the power of song. No one else sings like her. The girl’s song flows out of her like an outlandish bed sheet, warping and billowing in the breeze. The demon and the boy and the dinosaur fight for breath and space, gasping and shoving. The sound wraps around and traps them. But the way she sings is husky one minute, sweet and high-pitched the next and a low basso profundo the next. (The rest of the world is not so sure about her singing; everyone’s hair stands on end when they hear it.) The demon has had enough. With his claws, he yanks at the Buddhist’s hair to carry him to a mountain, but his claws become tangled and he cannot. He struggles to lift the boy. Whap, whap, whap! The whapping of his wings creates a hurricane that blows the whole entourage down the street. There they tumble into a river, and snag on sticks in the rushing current. The demon drowns along with them. But the river continues to sing the blue girl’s eerie, discordant songs for years to come. And the universe lies on its back, eyes closed in ecstasy.
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Kim Salinas Silva lives in Rhode Island with her musician husband and their dog, Zelda. She loves nature and all animals. She has a BA in Writing and Painting from Vermont College in Montpelier, Vermont. MFA in Painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, Georgia.
Author’s Backstory: In this case I was shuffling through an image bank online for images I could use for an ekphrastic poem. I came across a painting of a cross-eyed head of a boy; it reminded me of going (and staying) within to an interior world. A blue girl on a flower floating next to him gave me the spark of a dream-story happening between them. This along with an ‘evil bat’ sitting on the boy’s head served to provide tension. I am attracted to introverted stories like these, ones in which the outside world dare not intrude. I left the poem with a fairy tale-like legacy of dissonance in the girl’s singing, which carries on forever. And which, oddly enough, the universe adores. Perhaps this is about the soul’s, the universe’s penchant for imperfection, since within it the ego fades away.
Editor’s Notes and/or Image Credit: Abstract leaf depicts a pink daisy [wallpaperflare.com] with an anime girl [NicePng.com]
Amazing you are so talented