Some Things I Miss & Some I Don’t
Maybe not missing is forgiving and missing is holding on, the way I can taste and smell Teaberry when I miss unwrapping a pack of that gum; I miss the first day of school as a kid, a just-bought outfit laid out on my made-bed like an emptied girl and later as a teacher when my stomach gurgled and I couldn’t eat breakfast—a new year about to open; I miss my sisters living closer; I don’t miss my brother who sends me Honeybell oranges every year as if that could make up for his meanness; I miss sleeping well when I used to hear my ears let go of sound; I miss my mother baking cakes from scratch, how she’d make me take something to someone’s house, especially for a weekend visit—Never go empty-handed—that cake on the front passenger seat of my light blue VW bug and I, starving on the way down to Avalon, probably having smoked a joint, reach over, snake my hand under the Saran wrap—god! that chocolate, buttery icing and rich white cake that I ate by fistfuls, had to throw out the carcass and plastic plate of evidence at a gas station where I bought a case of Tab to give to the Bottomleys; I miss the softness of a gray V-neck sweater I had in high school, the kittens born in a box in my closet; I miss walking to school in spring when everyone’s yard was wild with forsythias and lilacs; I don’t miss waking up to an alarm, that sudden jolt into another world; I miss my father’s voice reading to us in the backseat, the sound of Earth, Wind, and Fire from the balcony of my dorm, the beginning of an evening blossoming; I miss knowing answers in math class, my sleeping children’s heavy heads in the rearview mirror; I don’t miss carrying dark secrets or stacks of papers to correct; I miss not thinking about knees and strange aches in my back when that whorl of skin and bones and muscles and blood hummed unaware; I don’t miss the scariness of thinking I may never find someone to love me forever; I miss the jangle on my wrist of the gold charm bracelet that was stolen, so much taken in one afternoon, how we had to start locking the front door; I miss looking forward to the next episode of Cheers; I don’t miss having to wake up early on Sundays to sit in a boring church school class or an even worse listen to a sermon where time slowed on wooden pews and I felt trapped in stories I didn’t believe; I miss believing that I had magical powers and death being so far away it could almost not be true.
Mini-interview with Sarah Dickenson Snyder
HFR: Can you share a moment that has shaped you as a writer (or continues to)?
SDS: Reading “Blessing the Boats” by Lucille Clifton was a stopping, a shift, a realization that a group of words on a page could muscle their way magically into my heart and soften fear, allowing me to breathe with more ease, to reveal the power of poetry.
HFR: What are you reading?
SDS: Books I am loving right now are The Great Believers by Rebecca Makai and The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka.
HFR: Can you tell us what prompted “Some Things I Miss & Some Things I Don’t”?
SDS: “Some Things I Miss & Some I Don’t” evolved from a feeling of missing. It’s really a list poem with a few stories tucked in. The cake one is a favorite of mine; seeing that high school me still makes me smile. How hungry I was!
HFR: What’s next? What are you working on?
SDS: Now I am working on series of poems from Eve; she’s been speaking to me for the last year.
HFR: Take the floor. Be political. Be fanatical. Be anything. What do you want to share?
SDS: I try to live in the present, listening and being aware of every second I get to be here.
Sarah Dickenson Snyder lives in Vermont, carves in stone, and rides her bike. Travel opens her eyes. She has four poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), With a Polaroid Camera (2019), and Now These Three Remain (2023). Poems have been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. Recent work is in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. More: sarahdickensonsnyder.com.
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Heavy Feather Review 