A Literary Magazine in Support of the Jewish Community
Florid
MOON
Why aren't you here yet
to glow tombstones
in the cemetery at dusk?
Finally.
I glue my eyes to your cool light
and gauzy shimmer,
until you do my bidding,
slinking down on the mowed grass
stretching full and wide, enveloping me
in your diaphanous globe body,
upward, we float.
But you will tire of me,
everyone does,
your silvery seam will rip open.
Inert as a grave marker,
I'll fall flat, back
to where death is.
TREE
You inch towards me,
with your shapely trunk,
full head of leaves and supple limbs.
You seduce me with your furrowed bark,
white and scaly with black frowns
and mascara-lidded eyes.
Your splinters are tongue kisses.
You make my body gossamer,
burrowing deep inside your hollow,
through inner bark and sapwood,
to heartwood, I'm alive here,
but someone will call my name,
tell me I'm sick again, and kidnap me
to a foreign place called home.
Willa Schneberg
Willa Schneberg is a poet, ceramic sculptor, curator and psychotherapist in private practice. She has been a fellow at Yaddo and MacDowell, and has authored five poetry collections including: Box Poems; In the Margins of the World, which was awarded the Oregon Book Award; Storytelling in Cambodia; the letterpress chapbook, The Books of Esther, produced in conjunction with her eponymous exhibition at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education in Portland, Oregon. She founded and curates “Jewish Voices,” an annual reading of Oregon Jewish Writers, now in its 22nd year. The Naked Room is forthcoming from Broadstone Books.
