Bartering

 

Where I teach you
the difference

between linking
and action verbs

and you erase death.
I show you how to steep

tea. You teach
breathing. I will make paper

and you will pen.
I will open a door

to the attic of things
and you uncover

the darkness,
the silence.

 

 

 

What’s Below

 

Scrunched and pressed stone
layers with clear pools

wedged in the rock veins
under the dusty ground,

under the migrating birds,
under the rushing clouds,

under the thirst of us—
how we can walk into a desert,

close to dying before finding
water below, how it tastes

of autumn, the slick roads,
the black branches shorn,

the waiting, waiting
for what comes.

 

 

 

To Contemplate the Motion

 

The heart—one remembers
water, the waves, the way wind
and moon corrugate a surface. In a heart

the stirring throb, each heart cell
beating under a microscope,
a small and deliberate

start as a pulse, moving watery
through a body encased in skin
and undercover—a secret,

the good kind
wanting to burst forth
because a catalogue of newness

will unfold. A second heart
beats inside you—you
feel filled with hearts.

 

 

 

 

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has two poetry collections, The Human Contract and Notes from a Nomad. Recent work will appear or has been in The Comstock Review, Damfino Press, The Main Street Rag, Chautauqua Literary Magazine, RHINO, The Sewanee Review, Front Porch, and Whale Road Review. https://sarahdickensonsnyder.com/