The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Sally Rosen Kindred's "Book of Asters"

Your Arm

I call it thick music, I call it milk and bread,
your skin under my tongue under the night-blue roof
of some twilight town we’ve never seen.
I call it sweet engine driving your hand
to my eye, coarse magic, one wand
over the water. I call it night
and skin that smells like glass. Salvation.
I call it wisteria growth, those buds
that break open and leak glue: my mouth
on your hand knows what brings us
together, knows what wiped on a leaf can drive a leaf
onto the white boards of a house.
I call it more than I’ll say, words on a wall,
my mouth running over them, my mouth running
over: I call it front yard, back street, house,
I call it your name, I’ll call and keep calling
till I can say morning, willow, tomorrow,
my wall, my roof, my own.

This selection comes from Sally Rosen Kindred’s book Book of Asters, available from Mayapple Press. Purchase your copy here!

Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of No Eden (2011) and Book of Asters (2014), poetry books from Mayapple Press, and the chapbook Darling Hands, Darling Tongue (Hyacinth Girl Press, 2013). She has received two poetry awards from the Maryland State Arts Council, and her poems have appeared in Blackbird, Best New Poets 2009, Quarterly West, and on Verse Daily. For more information, please go to http://www.sallyrosenkindred.com/.

Donna Vorreyer is the author ofA House of Many Windows (Sundress Publications, 2013) as well as six chapbooks, most recently Encantado, a collaboration with artist Matt Kish from Redbird Chapbooks forthcoming in April. She is an assistant poetry editor for Extract(s), and her second collection is forthcoming from Sundress Publications in 2016.