Katie Moore is a mother, writer, and wife...in that order. Sorry, husband. She is completely unfit for "real" work, as all she ever does is scribble. Her fiction and poetry appears in new and delightful places here and there, from time to time. She enjoys being vague. Most of her time is spent trying to make you happy, whether you know it or not.
Send her an e-mail at katie@downdirtyword.com
Poetry:
Letting Go Mantra
Fiction:
She Takes the Stage
Non-Fic:
Catching Fireflies
Letting Go Mantra (March 26, 2009. New Moon. Issue 2)
Occasionally I hate you. I ache to quit you. I will spend the next 40 nights meditating on your release. I will ask myself to scorn you like nicotine. Then I’ll stop smoking to celebrate. With my 108 rudraksha I will mantra my way to freedom from want of you, baking offerings while I am not thinking of you. Om with cinnamon for Ganesha to remove you, my obstacle. Hrim and apples for the Maya to rid me of remembering you. Krim, a dire pinch of salt, Kali-Ma make me a tower above you. Hum with rough sugar to sweeten my tongue after the taste of you. Shrim, an ocean of milk to bless me, while washing you away. When you are gone I will start again, a mantra to fill the hole you’ll leave.
She was alone before the show, smoking a cigarette at a table in the back, making her best bedroom eyes at the stage, her stage. It was like an affair, these weekly performances, an affair in which she didn't tell her real name and didn't know his.
They couldn't speak, communicating only through the movement of her body above–but it was enough.
He loved it when she went right to meet his left and they came together at the high note.
His old proscenium-pine knew her as Bella Italia, burlesque beauty, doe eyed darling, smooth and round with a healthy kind of heavy pressure to her steps. She wasn't the kind of woman the men just bought drinks for. If she had let them, they would have given her Cadillacs, diamonds, and their last names.
But she was there for him, and she felt like home-again, like a ghost from the days when he was new.
The ladies then were the real thing.
He could feel the difference between the real thing and a flat-assed fake in the veins of his floorboards. It was a skill honed over sixty years of dancing girls. With only touch to tattle their tales he could tell a hard-up opera star from a pitch-pleasant hooker within four footfalls, or pick a slumming socialite out of a crowd of common chorus girls at the first toe touch.
They both lived for these moments alone, beginning with the click of metal in the lock as she let herself in early, sometimes by an hour or more, always taking care to lock the door again. She left the house lights low but brought the stage up to a brilliant red, glowing through the curtains, casting a ruddy blush on her china-white face.
And then the seduction.
She didn't take off her coat until the second cigarette, smoking it slowly, savoring the antiqued air on her skin and in her lungs. Often she moved from her table to stroke the waxed oak bar, tickling it's timber like piano keys. He grew frantic, straining against his screws to reach for her.
She didn't rush, utterly at ease in the dramatic pause of a silent theater.
Midway through the third cigarette she kicked off her shoes and rolled her stockings down and off into tidy balls. She never mounted the stage steps before completing this little ritual. She swept him herself, trusting the task to no mere stage hand.
When he was clean she knelt down and bent her head to him, softly giving a kiss to the well worn wood. Her lips were powdered, each time, by an unsweepable silt of stage dust– smoke and makeup, skin and dreams.
She licked them clean.
They breathed together in silence, her hands pressed against him, fingerprints melding into his grain. She liked to think about their first meeting, bustling through the door to escape the teeth-chattering cold, gasping at the cozy glow of warm space. "Hello? The sign said dancers wanted. Do you mean...?" She had been nervous, but it melted away when her feet found him. "Oh, yes. I always dance barefoot."
When the next click echoed from the doorway she fled backstage, gone before the blazing illumination of the house light bathed over the tables, the chairs, the bar and his boards. He kept pious vigil until her return, tolerating the steps of the less perfect, the punctual and passionless.
He waited while the bar filled and the other girls winked and wiggled to the music, dropping their sheer or sequined clothes on him like some simple floor for fun or money, but not for love or art.
Some sang, some were sweet, but no one shone. No one but her.
She took the stage last and stayed the longest, starting slowly with her feet still simply bare and her dress sweeping low to tickle her toes and brush him with the smallest of sensations. A sense of sex and sadness followed where her feet fell.
And then she sang. It didn't matter what she sang, they stilled. The people with their clinking glasses, glowing cherries, and sweating, pawing palms were still and staring. The other girls jealously tried to look away, but never could. The bartender ceased his banter. Even the bouncer took a breather from looking for heads to bust.
She didn't wink or lick her lips for tips. She danced for a different audience. Below her he was happy. He could suffer a fire, a flood, or a wrecking ball now and be happy–as long as her feet were the last he felt.
Her clothes melted away with grace as every eye watched her mouth shape the notes, her body moving in a never choreographed illustration of the song. The nudity wasn't even necessary. She had a voice like a soft, buttery orgasm and eyes of an almond afterglow. She suggested everything and really showed nothing.
Slowly, she let the smoky gravel of her sound resonate him to his long-lost roots, each note falling at her feet, with her clothes, like a gift.
She could rattle the glasses on the tables or a man to his core.
This was the real thing.
She always ended on a big shivering note, high or low, stage left, sinking to her knees as that last sound swooned away and the stage lights dipped. Gone again before the house lights rose to the thrill of applause.
Backstage, she panted and sipped her apple brandy while he rested, relaxed into his foundation.
When everyone else had gone they would steal just one more moment, in the dark, before sleep, until tomorrow.
Catching Fireflies (March 5, 2009. Issue 1) (Non-Fic)
I remember. Catching fireflies when we were young, running through the summerish heat hand-in-hand with our jars and nets slipping out of sweaty palms and dropping dully into mossy beds of grass. Laughing at our glowing treasures escaping again into aerial freedom. We were so serious, shrieking in mock terror as our play turned to wrestling chases in the old forest behind Grandmother's house, where we sould spend hours oblivious to the darkness which seemed so menacing when it came time to sleep.
Exhaustion was a defeat neither of us would easily admit. In those days, when we were pirates, cowboys, and travelers through time, bravery meant so much. Instead of giving in to the most shameful weakness of growing tired first, either you or I would invent some sight or sound in the newly paralyzing darkness and we would run, screaming in deluded fright, back to the safetly of the brightly lit front porch to imagine tomorrow's impending battles.
Then, when our mothers came home, how we cried and voiced our protests with yawning wails.
"Oh, Mommy, we aren't tired at all!!"
But they carried us anyway, to our beds, whispering that any good pirate needs sleep to defeat the Spanish Armada.