Read More: A brief Q&A with Sarah Dickenson Snyder
Stitching Images
1.
This is something my sister
could have created, the way
she sews fabric to other fabric,
laces gold thread into what she unveils,
often a flower blooming, too—everything
in her place home-made, made in her home,
a space of weaving worlds.
2.
Or it could be a diagram in a fourth grade
science book where I learned about our tilting
planet pulled by gravity, that invisible power
I could never feel, always worried about falling
off a spinning globe orbiting a star we call a sun,
our marbled moon following us—everything stitched
together and woven in a galaxy by an unseen force.
3.
Is everything a circle? I have always seen years
as circles, a calendar pulling the last month back to the first,
that final curve of October leading us to December
and a new January. The circles get smaller and tighter,
as we age—babies born on the horizon of a widening turn
then sliding into smaller rings, the time it takes to orbit
another kind of quickening toward stillness,
the last spin more like an end mark, a small dot
I could lift, find what’s buried there.
Maybe the last moment is uncovering
what we were always hungry for,
maybe I’ll find I wanted less.
Ginger Roots
I never saw them
in my mother’s crowded kitchen,
but they remind me of her fingers
at the end, swollen knuckles, rings trapped—
the thin-skinned roots I slice and sliver,
put in almost everything,
how what is unseen under the earth
can create a flavor I remember settling my stomach—
sipping the ginger ale she’d brought upstairs
and nibbling through a sleeve of Saltines
on the daybed in the TV room
while I watched “General Hospital”
inured to the squirrels scurrying in walls,
the first room I remember
finding how good my body felt
muffled and alone, so good
I thought I might get a disease
from the sharp rapture and release,
probably where I began
to see boys as a new landscape,
a place to lean against to unleash
what I didn’t know but wanted.
Most good things grow in darkness—
seeds, roots, a fetus.
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What I Want
Maybe a hidden world
is erasure in the mind
or is the forgetting more like night?
Only the scent of snow
or the smooth body
of a found acorn
in a palm as mooring,
such meager tethering—
an astronaut out of the capsule
swimming in the darkness of endless space
tied to the ship by a single strand.
What does a world ask of us
and what can we ask of it—
weren’t we given pliant spines
to tilt our heavy heads
toward stars and sun,
that ache of day lilies
in summer, the way
one small light pulls
every moth into its gravity. […]
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Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, & rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019) with recent work in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com
“Ginger Roots,” “Stitching Images,” and “What I Want” originally appeared in Iron Horse, Bait:Switch, and Poem Town, respectively.