Cheryl Snell’s poetry collections include chapbooks from Finishing Line Press, Pudding House, and Moira Books. Her work has been nominated seven times for the Pushcart and Best of the Net anthologies. Her most recent collection is called Geometries (Moria Books) and her latest novel, Kalpavriksha. She lives with her husband, a mathematical engineer, in Maryland. Her 2021 credits include poems in Autumn Sky Daily, Eunoia Review, Clementine Unbound, Lothlorien Poetry Journal, One Art, and Words & Whispers.
Dry Spell
Then the rains came.
She swallowed hard,
and on the way down
the water was everything
blue swells and whitecaps
are not: not fists of diamonds
where bubble plumes persist,
nor rippling limbs tossing up fish;
and by the time she had become
a river, fish leapt from her, boats
lined her shores, fishers reared back
to cast their trawling nets over
the new world she had made so wet.
Gravity
We may have dark matter all wrong.
When I read this I wanted to turn off
all the lights in the house. We know
the world through our metaphors
and some truths cannot be seen directly.
Observations on bending the light,
the way we have of looking at a star
set inside a halo of galaxies we trust
not to fly apart, does not tarnish the star’s
brilliance through time and distance.
It taunts us for our disbelief─ but look at it
still up there, still glowing.
The Tao of Folding
And after dinner, the maid puts the family away like linens. She creases each member along their wrinkles and angles, edges and curves. The children are folded like origami birds for good luck and sweet dreams, and the parents are stacked one on top of the other tissue thin double thickness. The grandmother is long and narrow and must be rolled, yellow stains turned inward like shame.
As time wears on, the shelves in the linen closet give more to the family than a just place to sleep—they are a refuge, a hideaway, a vacation home. The ledges groan with time and from the children’s growing, so it is more and more difficult for the maid to get them up in the morning. She grows old with the effort.
She must admit now that she does a less efficient job when she tucks them in at night: the children want to be folded into origami computers, and that’s only the beginning. The parents are forever slipping their own neat stack of selves to tangle up in each other. There is slippage and mismatching and nothing remains where it was. This makes it hard for the maid to separate the parents in the morning. As for the grandmother, she has her own problems. She has curled into a stiff ball that cannot be straightened out and refolded, for fear of breakage. I’m set in my ways, can’t you tell? she says.
The maid comes to believe she could never leave this family, her family, and get another job, especially since she’s so bad at this one. But a sense of time unfolding pulls at her, and one night, after she’s tucked her people in, she slams the closet door on them and locks it; she opens it again almost immediately, like a last word snatched back. She quickly spreads out a large blanket and wraps the stunned family in it, knotting the corners, east to west, north to south. She slings the bundle over her shoulder. She calls it the past and drags it with her into the future. (first published in Melancholy Hyperbole)
