Donna J. Snyder - Two Poems

Shortest Distance Between Two Points

Fragments of photographs on the page

A walk along an uncharted path

The shortest distance between two points

not necessarily desired

A third point and we have a plane

The deus ex machina follows an earth eater

Graveled stone and mutilated plants

Masticated ash and dust falling from the god’s mouth

But matter can never be destroyed

only transformed

And it’s your duty as one of the chosen to walk

through this random chaos

Transform this momentary experience

through the mere act of observation

This hybrid moment

Part uncertainty principle

Part The Misfits

Give me a moment

Show me your eyes

Let the lies fall out of your mouth

Pieces of sky

Put my fingers on your scars

Piece together the fragmented photos

Give me this moment

This hybrid moment

Your consciousness

My consciousness

The shortest distance between two points

Connect the dots                               

Flayed Skin Spirals

                        “Think you’re escaping and run into yourself.”  James Joyce

Throat chakra knotted in barbed wire clots words

Strangled blue energy becomes blackened blood

Emanations of green become brown fetid detritus

Clenched fist in the chest

Sternum crushed to powder

A brutality ash gray

Smell of suppuration leads to suffocation

Flayed skin spirals in meaningless glyphs

Corpus nothing but a hole

Vortex of broken glass

Jagged metal mesh leads no where

Banal emotions horrify the voice into silence

Panic leads to eviscerating dread

A mouth gagged with cliché

Flesh-stripping sorrow

The no more

The no more

The no more      

Snyder is the author of Poemas ante el Catafalco:  Grief and Renewal, released by Chimbarazu Press in 2014.  Her chapbook, I Am South, was published by Virgogray Press in 2010.  NeoPoiesis Press will publish her collection, Three Sides of the Same Moon, in 2015.  She publishes often in VEXT Magazine and Red Fez and is a contributing poetry editor for Return to Mago.