in parentheses

Sierra Lind’s works have appeared in Snapdragon: A Journal of Art and Healing Issue 5.1 and Cathexis Northwest Press Our Poetica issue. She currently lives in the country of South Carolina to see the sunrise stretch across the summer corn and fall cotton and write when the timing is right.

Artwork by Arturo Cabrera

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SNAP SNAP

The second time doing this.
It’s been so long.
The nervousness and excited
jitters web together, getting closer
and closer. I hope I can do this.

I hear such passion
coming from the spider’s mouth,
its hidden secrets revealed
to all who are willing to listen:
an athlete in the far right corner
(away from the spider),
two girls giggling and whispering
(close to the athlete),
and the boy in front of me,
opening and closing his hands
repeatedly.

My name is called,
finally caught in the spider’s web
ready to be devoured. I read,
randomly acting out the secretive
words on frail paper, trying hard
to not stumble and fail the simple
task of reading words aloud. I’m left
kneeling before the spider,
ready to be engulfed,
to be told I’ve failed.
SNAP, SNAP, SNAP.
The web threads break
and I’m set free!

I notice as I return to my seat,
the athlete is gone,
so are the two giggling girls.
I listen to other people read aloud
their words of wisdom to the spider
and see the boy bow his head.
Why should he? He is not
a victim of the spider.

Finally, everyone has been called.
Any volunteers? I’m surprised—
my eyes going wide—when
the man proudly stands,
ready to confess, the web
forming around him as he glides
towards the spider’s mouth.

Unexpected Renewal

Among the forgotten treasures people discarded
lies a black and white blouse hidden between
a brown turtleneck and a pink shirt. A simple
pattern, yet the fabric flows like blood through
veins and soft like a newborn’s hair. I find
myself just gazing and touching such rich material—
until a woman needs me to move so she can pass.
She goes on and I remain, my moment’s magic
altered like a heart’s rhythm. A few seconds—

a distraction—that changed my point of view.
The mystic unsettlement became solid and real
and I buried the blouse back in the treasure chest,
but a small token appears in my peripheral:
a New York and Company tag. The woman
from before has the blouse in her buggy and I ask
if I can have it back. She feels it, looks at me,
and knows it does not belong among her extravagant
clothing. When walking out the store four dollars
less, the storm clouds release their tears and I smile.

To Lose One’s Self

is someone stabbing a pencil
into the back of your skull, eraser
fragments clogging your colored
memories until you forget. Redundancy

becomes your constant dance partner,
sawing off bone pieces and screwing
them somewhere else when you repeat
the lie, I’m fine. Overtime, you won’t see

your inner skeleton: a calcified black
and white stained-glass window with
mismatched pieces, your urge to scream
the truth paralyzed in your throat, nor your

dance partner that visits you in bed
and strangles you until you confess,
licking away your glacial tears and scrapping
the pencil down to the bottom—where

you realize—you stabbed the pencil and
became Redundancy: a useless skeleton.

Scuff Marks (On My Heart)

My sister soars the puck my way, a straight
path the puck takes, coming slowly towards me
the mallet loose in my little hands; wait,

little? The scoreboard changes: 4 to 3.
Goal! Sis squeakily yells. I grip the mallet
and swing the puck back, but it only goes
halfway. Rigid tears form as I try to hit
it, but cannot reach her. I turn and throw
the red mallet, watch it fly (for a few
seconds), and drown into the depths of time.

I hit the solid puck. It flies straight through
my sister and skids across black tiles. I
watch her walk away and out the cracked door
as I pick up the scuffed puck off the floor.

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