Synkroniciti is thrilled to welcome back Lissa Staples of Colorado with “Snow,” a masterful flash memoir/prose poem which we nominated for a Pushcart Prize. It recalls a vocal recital she sang with her mother when she was eighteen years old and her mother fifty-one: She is following in her mother’s footsteps, aspiring to become a successful classical musician, but her heart isn’t really in the game. Performing for her mother’s friends is expected, and they are kind, even about her technical flaws. She is drawn of out of the moment and the immediacy needed for performing to study the snow falling outside and the way it hides everything. In a similar fashion, Mother and her friends can’t see within her to know that she’s not fully present.
“She paused to tuck a stray wisp of golden hair into place and smoothed the long dress over her hips then came to me and gently held my cheek in her palm, smiling. I tried to see myself through her eyes: her self-conscious, awkward child to whom she had given a certain amount of musical talent. I sensed then that I was always going to be an imitation of her, like an off-brand label.”
The mother–daughter dynamic, the performance anxiety, and the longing for identity are palpable and highly relatable, even if the reader is not a performer. This is the threshold of adulthood and Lissa is watched, measured, and compared. Her life is performative, not only as a singer, but as a young woman trying to please her mother and society. She participates and amplifies this by watching, measuring, and comparing herself. The snow outside symbolizes the protection and erasure that she both longs for and loathes as she follows a path circumscribed by her mother’s shadow.
Read “Snow” in Synkroniciti’s “Patterns” issue, available here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Lissa Staples is a classically trained coloratura soprano who discovered that writing is a lot like singing in that the real joy lies in digging beneath the surface. Her work can be read in The Stickman Review, The Turning Leaf and Beyond Words among others. She lives in Golden, CO with her husband and three-legged dog, knitting her way through her yarn stash and singing to her grandchildren.