Women's History Month: Tuesday, March 23, 2021: Ilari Pass' poem "Cloudy With a Chance of Cello"

 

Cloudy With a Chance of Cello

      

I sit in the living room with my mother to work out

my anxiety

the way it tastes and feels, I thought I wanted to be everything

all at once

my teacher brags that she’s found

that Golden Ticket

my peers listen in for rumors, launch them as a curse

when chocolates

not passed around It’s just for show, I explain to my mother,

explaining nothing

last night

I was out of my skin to try on my favorite dress 

Crazy,

I thought. I laugh when my mother stares at me

on stage

everything all at once: mise-en-scène behind me holy

I miss my cue

when the conductor breathes; her baton a semaphore;

a single note

struck upon my cello; my mother smiles, grateful that I wasn’t aware

was out of tune

of all the ways to enter, my mother

calls for

Cloudy with a Chance of Cello, and I am ready to go home.

© 2021 Ilari Pass

Ilari Pass holds a BA in English from Guilford College of Greensboro, NC, and an MA in English, with a concentration in literature, from Gardner-Webb University of Boiling Springs, NC. Her work appears or forthcoming in Rat's Ass Review, As It Ought To Be, Triggerfish Critical Review, Kissing Dynamite, The Daily Drunk, Unlikely Stories, Rigorous Magazine, The American Journal of Poetry, Common Ground Review, Free State Review, Rejection Letters, and others.