Collage of Poems
in My White Leather Album
Tricia Knoll
My thirst for
vowel sounds vibrates
in
tree top winds.
The tattered
suitcase where I hide my worn-out
The ink carnations
flowing from the Zen master’s
brush
beneath the hum of bees.
The fireworks of
heartbeats held in red-orange fear
dissolving
into the damp night.
August apricots
nesting in the blue sunshine bowl
in
a kitchen where sisters explain their year apart.
Mercury that fell,
splitting into poison drops
skittering
to the north corner of the oak dance floor.
Tasseled horns of
the black bull thrusting
at
the matador’s sequined complacency.
Draft horses
turning over the loam
at
the end of bitter winter cold.
The lasso around
regrets that run away with me
and
that lariat that pulls me back to the stable.
The dog-eared
papers sticky and stained from fingers
snacking on chocolate sweets.
Poet’s Notes: Memory delivers up bits of a lifetime
in images bent at the corners like photos tucked into an album. The images in
this poem railroad through my mind, some as metaphors, some as actual
experiences—motive energy of life recalled. They
accumulate as a collage, one as equally true as the others. The album is white,
because I’m working on a manuscript called “How I Learned to be White” – and
though race doesn’t play into this poem, it does in many others I’m writing.
Leather? The skin I’m tucked into. I have a daily practice of writing haiku to
see something extraordinary in every day. Some of these images come from that
practice.
Editor’s Note:
This poem made the 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Award Contest finals and
was selected before Ms. Knoll was offered a Frequent Contributor spot.
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