Mary Ann Samyn's Inside the Yellow Dress (New Issues, 2001)

Here are just a few favourite passages from this impressive book. 


It is always like this.
I cannot calculate 
the hurt ahead of time.
I cannot spare myself.

                                            So I go headlong--

I go wanting.

And these flowers:

                                  how bright they are.

Dried,
             they keep their color all winter.

second half of

"Moving Away from an Event"

My mother is anger and want, a small girl.

I am a small girl too.

One of us darts in and out of the bushes.

                          The other cannot imagine her suffering.

end of "Poem with a Riddle in It"

Such a small idea and gone:

her hands in the air at dusk,

                       the sun--just a click now in the trees--

end of "Poem with Light on Its Shoulder"

I say gauzy the way you might say love, 

meaning my hunger--

          desire a net, after all,

                                             and rigged--

from "Fabric/Lyric"

Read my selections from Samyn's Beauty Breaks In (New Issues, 2009 and Purr (New Issues, 2005).