Tom Snarsky
Bitter Orange
When in the woven winter you find
your loose necklace of hearts around
another’s neck, you panic / & see
the scent of bodies coming off like
steam—the rigid rules you wrote about
in your letters are suddenly so many
blisters, the skin pierced like a thick
rind but O / so much thinner than that--
split the difference between behind
your knees & fear, the slow lake
this constant rain / keeps elevating.
If you were to sculpt an angel
from all / the scum at the bottom,
who’s to say it wouldn’t look like you
your loose necklace of hearts around
another’s neck, you panic / & see
the scent of bodies coming off like
steam—the rigid rules you wrote about
in your letters are suddenly so many
blisters, the skin pierced like a thick
rind but O / so much thinner than that--
split the difference between behind
your knees & fear, the slow lake
this constant rain / keeps elevating.
If you were to sculpt an angel
from all / the scum at the bottom,
who’s to say it wouldn’t look like you
Biography
Tom Snarsky lives in Chelsea, Massachusetts among stacks of books and ungraded papers with his fiançée Kristi and their two cat children, Niles and Daphne. He is on Twitter @TomSnarsky and he is the author of Threshold, a chapbook of poems available from Another New Calligraphy.
