To Follow Undisciplined Ink or Having Many Things to Carry, by Sarah Dickenson Snyder

​Think of all the things to save: 
those sheets of shirt cardboard, 
the Rabbit, rabbits I say aloud 
to no one on the first day 
of every month, the embroidered fabric 
I found in the night market of Chiang Mai, 
pens with thin nibs, what my mind finds 
like a planet devoted to spinning, 
that miniature metal sculpture of a woman 
riding a bicycle the black flap of her dress 
curled from imagined wind in Vietnam, 
pockets of letters, the tile from Istanbul 
symmetrical and filled with hues of blues 
like my daughter’s eyes & her voice in the dark 
at four-years-old, I don’t want to die 
alone, and the fact that each kernel 
of corn is attached to a thread of silk 
under the husk. Maybe the end 
will be like diving into a channel 
with a shore on the other side
that we don’t know is reachable. 
Maybe we’ll carry what we’ve saved 
as we fall into water or become water 
falling or at least feel touched 
by its weight, its glistening, 
that last breath unribbed.

​

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. 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). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. She has been a 30/30 poet for Tupelo Press, nominated for Best of Net, the Poetry Prize Winner of Art on the Trails 2020, and a 2021 Finalist and Semi-Finalist in the Iron Horse Literary Review’s National Poetry Month contest. She lives in the hills of Vermont. sarahdickensonsnyder.com