This selection, chosen by Guest Editor Claudia Santos, is from A Woman in Progress by Barbara Marie Minney (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
The Silence Finds its Way to Me
The silence finds its way to me
as the wrinkled man
beaten and withdrawn
sits on the worn park bench
fountains smiling in his head.
Pulling a scarf of quietude around me
I dream beyond the
boundaries of my imagination
and like Chinese demons
travel on a straight line
toward smiles of delicious pleasure
as silky desire
heats my soul.
Barbara Marie Minney (she/her), a seventh generation Appalachian, is a transgender woman, award winning poet and writer, speaker, teaching artist, guest reader/editor, and quiet activist. Her poetry and essays have been extensively published and translated into Spanish. She is the author of four poetry collections: If There’s No Heaven, the winner of the 2020 Poetry Is Life Book Award and an Akron Beacon Journal Best Northeast Ohio Book in 2020; the Poetic Memoir Chapbook Challenge (2021); Dance Naked With God (2023); and A Woman in Progress, the winner of the 2024 American Fiction Award for Poetry Chapbook, an Eric Hoffer Da Vinci Eye Award Finalist, and a San Francisco Book Festival Runner-Up. Barbara is a retired attorney and lives in Tallmadge, Ohio, with her wife of over 44 years and a menagerie of stuffed animals. 
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