"Collage of Poems in My White Leather Album" by Tricia Knoll

Collage of Poems in My White Leather Album

Tricia Knoll

My thirst for vowel sounds vibrates

             in tree top winds.

The tattered suitcase where I hide my worn-out 

          sweater when I have nowhere to go.

The ink carnations flowing from the Zen master’s

          brush beneath the hum of bees.

The fireworks of heartbeats held in red-orange fear

          dissolving into the damp night.

August apricots nesting in the blue sunshine bowl

           in a kitchen where sisters explain their year apart. 

Mercury that fell, splitting into poison drops

           skittering to the north corner of the oak dance floor.

Tasseled horns of the black bull thrusting

          at the matador’s sequined complacency.

Draft horses turning over the loam

         at the end of bitter winter cold. 

The lasso around regrets that run away with me

         and that lariat that pulls me back to the stable. 

The dog-eared papers sticky and stained from fingers

            snacking on chocolate sweets.

Poet’s Notes:  Memory delivers up bits of a lifetime in images bent at the corners like photos tucked into an album. The images in this poem railroad through my mind, some as metaphors, some as actual experiences—motive energy of life recalled. They accumulate as a collage, one as equally true as the others. The album is white, because I’m working on a manuscript called “How I Learned to be White” – and though race doesn’t play into this poem, it does in many others I’m writing. Leather? The skin I’m tucked into. I have a daily practice of writing haiku to see something extraordinary in every day. Some of these images come from that practice.

Editor’s Note:  This poem made the 2016 Songs of Eretz Poetry Award Contest finals and was selected before Ms. Knoll was offered a Frequent Contributor spot.