So, you came to me last night
in a strange dream with a strange cat.
One of you, with your smooth mouth
and pale eyes, with just the slightest hesitation,
gentled me, repeatedly.
One of you
settled
in a curl of heat around my shoulders
so deliberately.
There was a garden
and it seems
you played a
banjo…
The song remains.
Cheryl Hicks has had prose published in The First Line and Southern Hum, and one of her memoirs “The Goat Story” is to be included in The Remembrance Project at Howard University. Her poems have been published in Urban Spaghetti, Blue Fifth Review, Heliotrope, Makar, Snakeskin, Her Circle, Creative Soup, The Orphan Leaf Review, the delinquent, Autumn Sky Poetry, Silent Actor, Avatar Review and 103: The Journal of the Image Warehouse. She has been a featured poet at C/Oasis, is a previous recipient of the Paddock Poetry Award and presented poems from her series titled Conversations with the Virgin at the 2006 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Conference in Tucson, Arizona. Hicks currently teach photography and creative writing at the secondary level and is also a visual artist. Her mixed media canvases have been shown across Texas and in New York, and her work is showcased at the Image Warehouse in Athens, Texas.
© 2008, Cheryl Hicks
Halfway Down the Stairs 