Sarah Dickenson Snyder
What is Unseeable and Real
That vibration in the space between me
and someone I love or maybe not love
or maybe not even know, like a stranger
sitting next to me on a plane and we find
we have the same book and I tell her something
I’ve never told anyone before and when I take my bag
from overhead and walk on earth again
something stays, as if my blood and bones felt it,
and with me and my children, not any distance
in the beginning, that sharing of skin,
of course the divine edges in,
but even when they grow and leave
and return, I feel the shine of her hair
in my palm and breathe in his skin
after a hug, the between is holdable,
and with you, my love, that shuddering,
shimmering truth, how impossible
and luminous over decades,
our fire, an invisible fire.
Not-Mothering & Mothering
The raw bottom bone, the fatty corpuscles,
the thick red blood stilled as if everything
inside his finger was as shocked by the deepness
of the slice as I was on that rock outcropping
in Vancouver Bay. I had to look away,
nearly vomited as I called to my husband.
Once the cut was covered, the finally-flowing blood
staunched, once David and I were on the Zodiac boat,
sprinting through slapping water, I became a mother again,
pulled him close to me in that wind, said mother things.
In that make-shift hospital room I held his other hand
as the stitches tightened his skin together again.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera. She has been nominated for Best of Net, was the Poetry Prize winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a Finalist for Iron Horse National Poetry Month Award. https://sarahdickensonsnyder.com/