Current :: Cheryl Snell
Signing Sympathy
The ritual keeps us breathing
from biopsy to biopsy. The lump out,
or the whole breast; changing skylines
of loss.
In the early days, disaster trumped
disease, but there's only so much
to say about a car smashed on tracks,
a honeymoon in a hurricane.
At some point, I stopped listening.
I wanted to take my name back
from the card's ink ladder, cross it out
like a misdiagnosis, hush the talk
that would have quieted anyway,
once the envelope slid into the mailbox,
red flag raised like a fist.
Cheryl Snell is a two-time Pushcart Prize nominee with current work in Snow Monkey, Poems Niederngasse, Adagio Verse Quarterly, Carnelian and Esopian. She is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Flower Half Blown and Epithalamion. Her novel, Shiva's Arms, will be out next year from The Writer's Lair Books.
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Copyright 1999-2008 Cheryl Snell.