Barns
If you’re like me, you sewed and twisted your own bows onto that winter’s blue spruce, heated oil on the stovetop for popcorn and before it cooled began with thread to bind the pieces together into a single strand of yellow-white light. If there is a shade you can hear, that you are continually drawn to as you remember, it is this color yellow: the yellow that a test subject in an experiment on synesthesia once described as visually embodying both minor and augmented chords, their currents of foreboding and astonishment. It is not in any sense of the word your favorite, but this color is what you felt between that season’s genuinely unadulterated moments of content. If you’re like me, your bones were too delicate for the front seat and you sat there anyway speeding toward the converted barn where you selected a single ornament for purchase and then for years of obsessive, dogged safekeeping. Your mother continued on trying to make the holiday spiritually profound. The ornament was a bell or a slipper or a sled. It was glittered or faux-gilded or hung prettily from a ribbon. Its mechanics were intricate, the way it slipped down and pulled at the branches of the tree, making you adore and fear it. The barn meant something to you because it was a space of promise and a cousin of other locations where at some time or other you would forget yourself: in the maze of holiday decorations arranged by a candle factory or on the empty stage where horses originally were stabled and where actors’ bodies more recently had moved with manufactured intention, just outside the open door’s evening dark. If you’re like me, soon your theater barn will refigure itself as a museum or a rich eccentric’s place to summer. Everyone is pretending, but this is a love letter: it starts with although and ends awake in the middle-night.
Suzanne Manizza Roszak’s writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, The Journal, Ninth Letter, South Dakota Review, and Verse Daily. Suzanne is an assistant professor of English at the University of Groningen, a reader for CutBank, and an editorial assistant for Seneca Review.