“The Good, Pure Sound” by Stephanie JT Russell
#First
Long unremembered now is the name
of the bar where we met her that first
and only time. Palest bottle blonde,
indigo baby skin, thick soft trunk
oscillating an explicit mezzo purr.
Piloting canny exchange with her acolyte
—green as chloroplast—over tidy goblets
and immaculate cocktail napkins,
inches from our brimming chaos
of smartly lipsticked Prosecco flutes,
urgently rattling ice cubes, ruins of terrible
delicacies fringing chipped little plates,
and half a dozen swarming black ashtrays—
a crucible of nicotine volcanics,
briskly managed from the altitude
of our nail-thin Olympian egos.
Four of us that night, all thirty-three
that spring and revved like fuchsia Vespas
—sprinting to the imminent zenith of forty,
grand threshold of imagining our ravenous
femininity would transfigure into long awaited,
long-feared release from venal enchantments
with time, ambition, and too much coiled-up
talent ruthlessly expended on sex
and its terminal byproducts.
Braying across the banquette,
we dragged our chairs closer, bit by bit.
Till at last we shoved the tables together,
our parties conjoined like women at
a treasured water pump in the bush,
so consumed in chorus we barely noticed
how near we’d been to begin with.
#Next
There is a thing you see in women
who have long since left the place
we believed we were headed.
They eat the world alive
and thrust it back in a gust of furious
detachment. That night we bathed
in the penumbra of a creature who
nailed our hubris more shrewdly than
we dared admit to ourselves. You must
abdicate everything, she said, that is not
of and for your craft. Till you are
mediocrity’s bane, distant as Sheboygan
from a Borealis star.
Every song is a story, she said.
We tell as many as we can gather.
To give ourselves, if we are
the only listener, a dignity of privacy
in the good, pure sound. And for
them who might hear you in the street
below your window. We learn the stories
to become what we cannot otherwise.
And tell them newly as our bond with
the sound daily reinvents us
from belly on out to feet.
Our clinking glasses stilled,
she whispered:
When you master a story for yourself,
it is second nature to sing it
for them who come to hear you,
and you alone, tell it.
#And Then
I thought I knew Angel Eyes.
Years coaxing it into a signature hook,
my throat gorged like a greedy marquesa
hoarding too many of the same cut
of brooch. But when she turned to me
(Sing me a story, love), I shrank.
I’d let the story go soundless
as a desert lacuna.
So, sinking to the gritty floor I told
it whole, first time since the story,
and the man, got away.
I can still feel the wine-stained old varnish
imprinting my knees like intaglio.
When the last note of ‘scuze me while
I disappear rose in unbreakable knowing,
she leaned back into the chair, whispering,
That’s it. That’s all there is. And if there’s
more, it’ll find you. Sing it or not, it’ll find
you, and finish you at last.
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Stephanie JT Russell Artist Statement:
I’m a prolific interdisciplinary artist, author, editor, and cultural worker. The most recent of my nine creative nonfiction books is One Flash of Lightning, a poetic treatment of the samurai code (Andrews McMeel). I am published in books and journals such as Words Upon the Water, Xavier Review, The Winter Anthology, Silver Birch, and Sequestrum. My visual art and performance work have appeared at The Griffin Museum of Photography, The New Museum, The Albright Knox Gallery, Bowery Poetry Club, and numerous other spaces. I have taught theater craft and writing in post-conflict nations, most notably in Liberia and Sierra Leone.
I’m continually drawn into meditation on the web of life we share with time, nature, and the vulnerability to structural forces. My work seeks empathy in the ephemeral realities of time, aging, and existence itself—realities faced by every living thing. Artists continue to play a crucial role in sustaining a language of empathy in human awakening and evolution. Being part of that ancient tradition keeps me connected to the purpose of art and the living community of artists, even in my most isolated moments of creative struggle. This sense of connection is an irreplaceable gift that feeds my work.
