Poor Claudia published poetry, prose and conversations online and in print from 2009 to 2018.

Dennis James Sweeney

One Poem

    Snow: A Definition

    1. Snow.
    2. A definition.
    3. Your mother is saying goodbye to you.
    4. White.
    5. Every human will be miserable for ____ of their life.
    6. What good is this?
    7. What use for the long heart?
    8. Prayer.
    9. Memento mori; or, simply, bones.
    10. Tracks in the ____.
    11. Tip of the fingernail.
    12. Happiness; or, mirror; or, a car alarm at four in the mo ning, waking you from a dream of splitting ice.
    13. Tears in the newborn.
    14. Tears in the elderly.
    15. Cocaine.
    16. The flying machine leaves at ____.
    17. Calculate chances of ____.
    18. Young men pursue a couch through a storm, grin at the camera, to st to health.
    19. The cat house.
    20. The bat house.
    21. ____, hot fear.
    22. Emptiness.
    23. The color of weight; or, of wait.
    24. Tender armies.
    25. A silent attempt at adventure.
    26. Old film.
    27. New film with romantic aspirations.
    28. “Peace Studies.”
    29. Across the country, people moan in foreign pleasure while you li naked in your room waiting for the ceiling to fall on you, wh ch is ____.
    30. Narnia; or, Mordor; or, England; or, the sewer; or, home.
    31. Tiny, flying corks.
    32. “Truth-telling.”
    33. “Always-already.”
    34. An amalgamation of ancients.
    35. ____.
    36. A cover, to anything.
    37. The contours of the hills where your mother was given her ma den name; or, where she lost it.
    38. Soft and fine.
    39. Gravity for the robes.
    40. A ring of ____ around the (more) precious metals.
    41. Repeat.
    42. Someone’s hair.
    43. Believe in what will die before you will.
    44. Sans milk, sans breast.
    45. “Chrome.”
    46. The freezer section for more than a year, with a mop.
    47. The fourth cross.
    48. Invisible hand, invisible nail.
    49. Chicagoland.
    50. The process of forgetting to forget.

    Dennis James Sweeney

    Dennis James Sweeney is the the author of the chapbooks What They Took Away and THREATS (forthcoming from alice blue books), and he is the Small Press Editor at Entropy Magazine. Dennis lives in Corvallis, Oregon.