Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 1, is now online. Enjoy new poems by Maria Sanz (translated by Lola Hidalgo-Calle and Mark Putnam), Tim Cresswell, M.K. Foster, Colin Schmidt, Yehoshua November, LeRoy Sorensen, Yuko Taniguchi, Ben Debus, Mary Moore, Elijah Burrell, Charles Harper Webb, Amorak Huey, Allison Joseph, Cassandra Cleghorn, Jennifer Highland, Danielle Mitchell, Michael Hurley, Judy Kronenefeld, Amanda Doster, Laurie Klein, Daryl Jones, T.J. Sandella, Janet Hagelgans, Doug Ramspeck, Jennifer Bullis, Tina Richardson, Lynn Schmeidler. With reviews of Ada Limon and Kristina Marie Darling by Dave Seter and Donna Vorreyer.
Tag Archives: Lynn Schmeidler
The Ecosystem That Is My Body Now That I’m Dead
by Lynn Schmeidler
I did nothing until I was ready—
my terra firma snagged in sky.
Birds arguing over road signs.
What does it look like from here?
Damp-leaved early December slick
in the lap of eternal freethinking.
The moment those firths let go
their river hands, is the moment
I turn translucent beneath the giant
copper beech. You, mountain
up which I swam loam-faithed
and bubbling, listen: you made me
breath by breath, you showed me
the orchid’s lip for crying out loud,
you laid out your vertigo glamour
and invited me to kneel at your skirt
and offered a ladder to the catwalk
of your lashes, winter I could not see
to see threatening as a threshold.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 1.
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Coffin in the Shape of a Snowdrift
by Lynn Schmeidler
As usual, I hardly felt the cold, or I felt it
as I felt my own tongue in my mouth—
gratefully. Freezing quiets the mind. I had never
been so calm. I lay on my back, head
cradled in brown leaves, ears filling with snow,
like the sateen deer who nest at night
in their oval earth beds, and I was in love
with everything I saw—bud scale and birch
bark, fan-shaped twigs, the long blue shadows
stretching over snow, and—then the letting go—
some of the Berkshires looked like vertebrae
and it was comforting to sleep on them.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 4.
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