Donna Snyder (Western Voices 2020)

Exclusive: Western Voices, 2020: Edited by Scott Thomas Outlar

Bio: Donna Snyder’s poetry collections include Poemas ante el Catafalco:  Grief and Renewal (Chimbarazu), I Am South (Virgogray), and The Tongue Has its Secrets (NeoPoiesis).  Her poetry and book reviews appear in many publications including such journals and anthologies as Red Fez, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, VEXT Magazine, BorderSenses, Mezcla, Inanna’s Ascent, and Speak the Language of the Land.

Surrealist Lee Ballentine’s poems have appeared in Abraxas, ACM, Caliban, Denver Quarterly, Drive They Said, Exquisite Corpse, Mississippi Mud, Painted Bride, Portland Review, and many other magazines, journals, and anthologies, and he is the author of seven books of poetry. His literary and publishing papers have been acquired by Ohio State University for its Avant Writing.

Sweet dreams were made of this

Generosity crawled from my pockets like scorpions.
Their hair stood up on their heads in rusty locks.
A flock of seagulls swooped up,

took all my bread, began ripping away,

their faces twisted into mocking jibes.
They sucked the juice from my lips, flew me
up above steel radio towers, dropped me

like shellfish, gleeful cackles when I broke.
I heard bouncing metal balls beat open flesh,
idiot birds' mocking laughter as my broken bits
tried to grow back together like a star.

Dripping acid on my sweetest softness.
A clutch of crazed addicts rushed me,
pushed me into a cobwebbed corner,

A boy mocked me, his mouth twisted,

injected me with thallium and strychnine.
They took everything I had, all my money,

the smallest act of kindness, all healing laughter.

They took it all and left me nothing, left me
twitching in unfamiliar thorns. Vitriol ruined
everything.  Even my only home broken into bits,

flung across the frozen desert, an infertile seed.

Lament for the end of the world

Collaboration with Lee Ballentine

no more sweet dreams

of granite, jade, and glue

offered or permitted

& no scowls

the order of the day is death

but the hundred episodes of death

are not permitted now

only two or three

a few coughs, fever, then death

a quick goodbye, then death

its bones gleaming

like a pearl-handled revolver

death in the bed

death beside the bed, not in it

outside

white streets and stone steps lit by the sun

inside

an aching back, then death

a twisted neck

lungs burning like Australian brush fires

dirt burning underneath the floor

creatures falling from the sky at my back door

then nothing . . .

an empty train, an empty car

a singer who incants but who does not wake

any more

no more sweet dreams

but colors in the evening sky

and the soft thuds

hitting the ground

but silence is never silent

Collaboration with Lee Ballentine

Like an ultimatum of birds gone to their winter nests,

I refuse to speak in the shadowed echoes of your applause.

Like things you will never hear again, sounds tremble as they fall,

leaving nothing but your voice telling me what I cannot be.

As my honest self fades to gray, I hear its damp echo.

A machine preaches tolerance, but I see only scowls.

The eruption of unbidden tears. Imperfect duplicates.

A divided spirit—sonorous voice, gregarious smile—

belies the familiar fist. The slammed door and bruised spirit.

Heartache demands shame’s silence.

But silence is never silent. Car doors slam. Jets

roar through dirty sky. Distant dogs complain.

Choppers enforce imaginary lines between Us and Them.

Or maybe bear torn flesh, twisted bodies, the comma of death.

Train tracks thunder a despot’s rage that stops for nothing.

A teacup knocked to the floor, a tympani of windows and roof,

a glorious vibration, the sound of fragile metal, a car

dropped to the concrete floor of a garage in the next block.

Pigeons trill sweetly, then scold anyone without seed.

Water flows through pipes like the presence of god.

Breath rattles through tubes of flesh and dying lungs.

Snub nosed dogs snort and snore in irregular rhythms,

like the voice of ghosts from beyond a non-existent wall.

They cannot stop telling stories of all that’s long forgot.

Footfalls from wooden floors where no feet walk.

I breathe poisoned hills and smell toxic water. My life

demolished like a listing shed in the rail yards.

Lost as the travelers who never returned home

bathed in the midwinter scent of a sea’s perfume.

The migratory odor of abandonment lingers,

and I have nothing to say to you.

The waves you would not see

shimmer like a mirror of clouded ice

gone frozen over the falls.

Setu, April 2020