IF I AM

If I am a rose, what am I

without red clothes?

I want you to know.

EACH SPRING

Each spring a necessary trespass,

a living epitaph.

I wake into willow and may

only affect the yogic position

of blowing away,

yoked as I am to the humanity

that makes me a tree.

Under my gay wallowing, meet me.

SUPINE

Supine, we lie horizoned

on the bed and his head

on my stomach’s a sun,

it rises and sets

as the ceiling sighs in her sleep.

But in the mirror

that we’d suspended there

the beautiful boy with my breasts

is silent in his mouth.

O my duvet blue.

Chloe Bliss Snyder is a poet from upstate New York, now living in Idaho, where she studies and teaches poetry at Boise State University. Recent work of hers can be found in Luigi Ten Co, Mercury Firs, Tagvverk, Caesura, Annulet, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in The Chicago Review. Her chapbook Ekho and Narkissos was published by the pamphlet series The Swan and its recording can be heard on PennSound. Chloe also translates French-language poetry.