Deliberately and exactly,
when I dream of satisfaction, it fills me
as completely as an airbag fills the space
between the dreamer’s face and a disastrous dash.
Just last night I dreamt seduction.
Behind my eyes the swirling cavity
was packed with words, with blazing
actions and intentions, lines and spaces
specked with half-notes destined never to be sound.
When at last the music woke me,
I was succinctly bound
between approaching traffic
and the blaring horns of diving maidens.
I note the beat, the vague instructions
you have given me to play this fugue:
More finite than amorphous masses,
less definite than round.
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 