Hocus Pocus

A magician pulls an angel
out of his hat by its ears.
It rises to the roof of his life, cursing:
I come to you
limbs tucked in
with misdirected prayers.
I messenger them anyway,
while you perform
with your chameleon silks
and bottomless bottles,
that trick with smoke and mirrors.
When you feint death,
your assistant sawed in half with worry,
that’s the time you feel me near.
And when I vanish like an old gold coin,
(your dirty angel)
I can see you almost believe in me.

The Body is a Throwaway Thing

Curved spine
snaking
through her jungles.
Shoulders, a pair
of birds. One
soars, the other
plunges to where
feet drop
and drag at the end
of twisting tributaries --
but every night
the seam-stitched sails
of her two arms
fill with wind
billowing
over the bridge in her mind
to the sea
leaping with miracle.

AORC 21st Juried Show,

No key
No door
No room
No bed

Just this carpet pad.

Carpet already stolen.

No valuables
in the blanket

This picture was in the trash
It’s worth nothing.

Picket fence Spiky sun
Stick-figure people

Nothing worth having

No people
No house
No

Please do not steal anything.
This is my home.

Illumination

When I sit alone
in the light
it is clear
 I am blind

How else is darkness known
 but by its absences

Scales Fall from His Eyes

From an eclipsing sky
he tumbles down a well
thinking about the bereaved,
how they line up at ticket counters
looking for their own way out.
What would they do for the chance
to walk away from their skins? Smoke
alarms fail, insurance expires. You can lose
yourself in love and wake as a stranger’s revelation.
And because epiphany loves a well, because
it storms the half-glimpsed memory, it rises
to meet the sliver of light that burns eyes awake
while the body keeps on drowning.

Because She Could Not Wait for Spring

Brush by dripping brush
the woman laved color
over the winter weary kitchen.
White-winged counters drifted
amid the blush of seashells.
Cupboards rocked off their hinges
with the idea of orange
and the chairs knocked knees
under a bee-bright table.
The floorboards also clamored
for reinvention, to be swiped
with intimations of moss,
until at effort’s end,
the tongue-drag of green
would hold the painter fast
with the knowledge that
she’d never leave the kitchen now.

The silence
the moment before
the child cries.
The stillness in the words
that come out of the silence
that is not still, moving
with the child
when she turns to run away.
Silence speaks
and can stand at the door
long past the hour
that quiet should have been broken,
shot through with syllables
like a prayer
before it sings itself extinct.

BAD

The taste of iron,
the eroticism of
someone else’s pain.
None of it is our fault.
We are true
to our natures.
We wrap sins
previously paid for
in butcher paper
and pray to the figurines
in the attic.

We need something to lean on
and the gables' stiff creaking
leads us to believe that
someone still lives here.
Someone to bleed.

SPIN

We are attracted to round--
hot sun and cold moon
wavy light from lamps
the red coals of cigarettes.
The O is a point of fixation:
pairs of breasts, Frisbees,
football. A waxed head.
The spin of this mad blue globe
supports a cycle of chase.
We use wheels to go out
on our tangents. Sometimes
a ring to bring us back in place.

Happy Birthday, Jannie!

we measure the meaning of forever
you move
through me,
and light
bounces
from one
skin
to the other.
dark hides
from light as light
pursues it
but it’s dangerous
to stand this
close
to that
truth
while the clouds are 
erasing the sun.

A lovely compliment!

"Rarely do I encounter authenticity, humbleness, life in a poem or a painting. Usually, it is an encounter with the glib, the ostentatious, the moribund. Gestures toward the unremarkable. Painter Janet Snell and poet Cheryl Snell create from genuine depths. How do I know this? Because time quivers when I experience their work."

Our heartfelt thanks to Tim Buck!

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.

MOTEL6

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.

Undertow

On the way down
the woman
sees everything
blue swells
and whitecaps
are 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.

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.

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

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

LEAP OF FAITH

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. If I could

touch my desire, I’d drown it.

Surge forward you say.
Your laugh is breathless and blue.

Lean in blind, I reply.

WRAPPED

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.

OJECT OF DESIRE

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

Thought animates the dark--
pulls back
on a paring of light

climbing through the window.
It lingers 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.

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
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 float of uncountable time?
You think you thought you heard
a song enter you then, but when
you woke, you remembered
nothing.

migraine

like a restless husband
looking toward the door
the body begins to betray you

it sends up warning flares
along darkening roads
and hidden railroad crossings

one brow lifts
over squeezed-shut eyes
as if it has another place to be

and, as if intending to deceive,
tears leak from only one side
of your face.

a body tries to tell its truth
but the sun is shining hotly now,
never mind the pain light brings

HOW TO GENERATE HEAT

A woman rises up under her man
and the world disappears. Shadows
sweep across his face and swallow the room
like Atlantis or Pompeii. Disasters like that
should stay packed away in a history book,
hidden in the back of the stacks someplace
where people who don’t want to know
don’t have to look.

The man lights a candle and brings it to bed.
A bright spot blooms behind the silhouette
of the woman, fully dressed now, leaning
out the window. Someone in the street below
is smoking a cigar, but the woman can’t see
what it cost him: his hands are full of ashes,
his fingers licked with flame.

OVER & OUT

My before followed
your after,

your down and out,
your without within.

 Despite or because,
I became around and about,

but you wanted behind
 and possibly under.

Considering for and against,
how to get beyond? 

Our inside among was
neither here nor there,

 so

if became when
and then, right now,

and the present was where
I moved past you.

89

With the album spread across her knees,
she turns the pages of her life
where sons become brothers, nieces are cousins.
A husband died,
but peacefully, of natural causes.

Is this you?  she asks, pointing to a  photo.
I’m ten, my Brownie uniform weighted with badges.
You were so sweet with your band-aid knees and blonde braids.
You liked to sketch the horses we kept on the farm.
Her farm. Her childhood. The brain unravels backward.

Did I know you then?
I tell her that I am her daughter.
You are? How lovely!
She closes the book and holds me
as close as if one of us had been lost.

In the drawing
I am not the charcoal,

not the chalk. I am everything else
the drawing is not. I am not
the line nor the space, the light nor the shadow.

I look into my moving mind and see

the charcoal and the chalk,
the line and the space,
the light and the shadow.

They lope along the blue landscape

where my thought's just been,
a moment of chance stored as experience.

Every day I turn inside out for you.

Tongue

It moves in him, strong as seizure
but soft, the glottal convulsions.

Out of the mind’s muscle,
 words rise to be spat
 the story inside him
struggling to eat its way out.

 That’s not what I meant
Words are full of holes, glaring, glaring.

In the cool cave of thought
 his twisted root leads backwards and forwards
along the slippery streets
between teeth and lips.

WINGS

Pink blossoms from the cherry tree
swirl around the garden birdbath,
plush the lounge chairs, drape the table
in fragrant cover. The evergreen, too,
has thickened with flowers, leaning low
over azaleas not yet in bud.

Arriving on paths of wind-tossed petals,
a flutter of moths settles in the deserted cherry.
Its stark limbs shiver with wings
filling the indigo emptiness
like the empty places I turn from now,
before the night backs into what it was --
failing light and fading voices
reaching out toward what is lost, as if to say,
I didn't mean it, as if to say, please come home.

How the Dry Spell Ended

For months she crisscrossed
a hot dry path
until her lips split
and she called out for comfort.

The rains came and she opened her mouth
greedy for each drop that filled her.

She was a river
and fish leapt from her
until her hook was baited
and she became the worm.
 

The ear, taken by surprise
encloses the dark,
its singular humming.
Your own song could confuse it,
so keep it sotto voce.

To separate nuance from noise
takes practice: let whorls that circle
the smooth-muscled tunnel
swell like summer.

Against the drums,
a percussion of bones moves
intricate things in their fringed peripheries,
and a spiral shell, like the one you once held
in your six year old hands, twitches
with a truth you had to learn to hear.

 

YOU SEARCH FOR OUR TRACK

You are nearer now,
a flicker of light upon a spine,
floating toward me
over carousels of luggage,
through time zones
pocked with stoplights
and the bulge of alternate lives.
I wait with nerves vibrating
like colors on a map,
one stumble away
from cold fluorescence
and worst case scenarios
while you stand still for a moment,
perhaps waiting for the hour to fulfill its destiny
before you bound down the escalator,
eyes on the exit, its revolving door,
your fingers curling around the handle
of the cab that will pull you
into the roaring rush hour surge.

Women In Art

Happy National Poetry Month!