One Last Effort to Be an Orchestra

February 1, 2014

One last effort to be an orchestra By: Christell Roach I. Before anger gets the beat out of me, I will attempt to hold onto my sanity: By letting flow Afro-Cuban melodies, that breech barriers of double bar endings. I will abandon this classical stoicism and grab hold of the essence in culture; the essence – in our skins, the essence – in our tongues… When we pray, we let our fears dance with our aspirations. We jazz singers, swing our hopes up yonder! We bend brass instruments, we snap cello strings, and choke the soul out of our voices – just to be worthy of the altars on God’s ears. The most Holy language is music. II. The percussionist has finally tapped into his inner swing. He is no longer a skinny dipper drowning in a fools’ tune. He has joined the beat-keepers, he has saved his soul – he knows now that heaven is full of varying musicians in different skins. God is a composer, and his angels are interpretations within our sheet music. We music makers shed our beings behind microphones, as we chisel praise out of our bones We root out Santería chants, urban outcries, African spirituals, and the shamans in our violins – when we sing behind these instruments. This is a congregation of worshippers. This is exposing the hidden harmonies on our callouses. This is musical piecing of varying musicians in different skins… like heaven. I. There is an orchestra crawling beneath my skin. The beats are unchained. My heart is a jazz combo with 50 bars of silence. I am shackled to the music. I cannot sing to you through slurred notes anymore. I cannot be played, I am not a cello . I don’t have bass strings to filter your rhythm out of my veins – my bones are immobile time-signatures… The jukebox in my heart is jammed, it is stuck on overplay – my heart is playing your tune over and over again – and you still claim you don’t know how to play heart strings. You motif – you fool! I just wanted to interlace my fingers – vibrato-ridden, and dainty – in the hands of the jagged devotee cursed with his music making. My heart beat out a core-wrought rhythm when you said you loved me. You claimed you adored the many cultures in my voice. The percussionist in you was so versed in time-keeping, that he didn’t even noticed he beat the heart out of me for his melody. I thought touching souls was essential, in order for us to compose, in order for us to coincide our ear-flattering atrocities – so that fragments of us wouldn’t be suspended from higher octaves, and un-tied notes wouldn’t be lingering in our palms. This is a plead to God to please wipe away these unwanted feelings... this is too much interpretation for me.

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chrisy10123

Christell Victoria Roach was born and raised in Miami, Florida. She is an artistic soul that wears many hats, (a renaissance type of girl). She enjoys all the arts, dances in her church, and studies the Viola and Creative Writing in School. Seeing writing as her forte, and her most adequate form of expression: it is the field she is most diligently pursuing in high school, and hopefully in someone’s university next year. Christell is in the 12th grade at Miami Arts Charter School. She has been published in Figment Literary Magazines’ ‘Why I Write’ Anthology, in Dog Eat Crow Magazine, in Rattle Literary Magazines’ Young Poets Anthology, in The Traveling Poet Literary Journal, and in the Postscript Journal. She has received 4 Silver Keys for her writing in the Scholastic Alliance for Young Artists and Writers’ state evaluation/competition, has received 3rd place in Poetry Matters’ 2011 poetry competition, and won 1st place in the 2012 Poetry Society of Virginia poetry competition. She has competed on state and national levels for Spoken Word; she is a member of Tigertail Miami International WordSpeak team that performs annually at brave New Voices competition, has competed in the Spoken Word Category in the National Fine Arts competition of 2012, and was awarded 3rd place in the Poetry Out Loud state recitation competition of 2013. Christell is a creative thinker, a writer, and musician: she can very knowingly say writing is her forte. She sees it as her only adequate form of expression, and she harvests it daily under the direction of her role-model, and mentor, Jen Karetnick.

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