Cheryl Snell's Blog, page 37

NaPo 20

Wide Net

When you cry out
in a language I don't know
I want to follow where you are,
stowaway in the boat of your ribs
under the oar of your arm.

You crash on the shoals
of your other country, your sisters still
waiting, your brothers scanning the horizon
for their own escapes.

How can they fathom the depths we drown in
every dappled night? Where the day
has crisped black, we cast our net
toward the shadows. We fill it with fishes.
Dripping light, we throw each one back.

NaPo 19

Motel 6

The pause in the dialogue.
Promises made of paste.
How did you come to me?
I lied to your face,
which broke open anyway,
slats of neon falling across
features I no longer recall.

It's the Vacancy sign
that stays with me, its molten
landscape with the current
shorted out. On a map of dark
topographies, that sign
burrowed into my loneliness
with its prophecy.

NaPo 18

Undertow

Sinking,the woman
sees everything
blue swells
and whitecaps
are not: not
fists of diamonds,
nor rocking hips,
not rippling
limbs tossing up
fish nor are they
sorry
for the depths
to which
they have plunged her
drowning ship.

NaPo17

CIRCLE THEORY

You're better now,
your wounds have closed,
there is sapling strength.
Your sister is still
at the other end of the phone,
singing her hosannas.
Your ex thinks it's his turn now,
though tit for tat was never established.
Demands are made. Some are met.
The ones who hurt you most want forgiveness
at all hours of the night. You can't sleep anyway,
and when a friend offers a back rub when what
you really want is sex, you slide down the door
of your own locked-out life, and count yourself
lucky.

(FYI- our NaPo collaboration is posted in its entirety at Scattered Light)

NaPo 16

Snarl

It rained for days
when you left,
the city's wheels
mired in mud,
waterlogged trees
falling across the road
in splintering grids.
It made me think
of the kind of traffic
where you followed
close behind me,
bumper to bumper,
trusting we would get off
at the same exit --
until the sudden slowdown
the stop and go
the changing of lanes
that led you away from me
and would prevent you
from ever returning

NaPo 15

Line of Thought
horizontal and vertical
cross paths where
the distance
between two points is not
that short. there is more
to consider
than distance & direction --
break the line
hold the line
stay inside the lines
but
between the lines
is where
an idea often hatches
latching onto its grid
of tangled pros & cons

NaPo 14

Whoever holds up the universe
is blowing bubbles again.

Rough waters, one silver body trying
to rise above another.

Wet with the wash of morning,
I hear you singing. Your voice

is breathless and blue. Surge forward
you say.If I could

touch my desire, I'd drown it.
Lean in blind, I reply.

NaPo 13

Tea-green rain
slants through the sky
and night crawls across our bed.
You climb in
with your warm hands
and in the falling light,
we listen
to the wind move
through the day's memory.

What needs forgetting?
We know night by its absences
and there is no sound
but the rain and the wind
and the small click of your fingers
as you pull the green in around us.

NaPo 12

Start with a stretched canvas,
weave loose as a lover's limbs.
Primer going on and the room silent as snow.

When thought animates the dark
it pulls back
on a paring of light

climbing through the window
to linger on the model, her slip
white as gesso.

A long drought, the sudden touch, a veil
pulled away. What's between the layers
lets the image live.

NaPo 11

Poem Made of Sleep

Lower your limbs into it
like a bath, your spine repeating
the blue wave of your lashes.
A tear made of the day
escapes onto your cheek. Breathe
out. Make it deep as a sigh
born not of sorrow but resignation
to the day's final act.

Let your systems stutter like the slow start of rain
and your fingers curl slightly. What was it like
before you were born, treading your mother's depths
in the waft and float of uncountable time?
You think you thought you heard a song enter you then,
but when you woke, you remembered nothing.