fiddleheadless

The Fiddlehead rejected a batch of poems yesterday:

Dear Ms. H--,

Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept any of your poems for publication in our issue. We did enjoy reading them, and our favourite piece was "Three Women."

Kind Regards,
K----

I expected rejection. I didn't expect feedback. Very good. It is interesting that they liked this poem, and didn't mention the one that always receives strong feedback. Maybe I'll wander over to the black stilt tonight to read it.

Three Women

Old photographs evoke
the affinity to death I feel
in graveyards; the mock
of the sunken plots like the sharp,
flat smiles of black
and white mouths.

Like these three women, burned
into sepia tones, translated
from time to eternity.

The one in the center, in white,
with bullet-hole eyes, white
coat, stockings, layers
of gauzy white like the haze
of memory; in her bag she clutches
the secret of a moment, which always lies
somewhere unreachable.

Suspended like petrified fruit,
these women; flattened
by time, like a stone;
three pressed flowers.

The slice of sunlight under their feet
reaches like a scythe, drags them
to this snapshot, their afterlife.

Time clutches at us, from
the world that lies beneath
experience; the inverse of photographs;
your face in the mirror
whose changes no one sees;

You clutch to roots you believe
are branches, turn the world
inside out like the back of a photograph
against a window
in the moonlight.

The fear of becoming memory,
or worse, to slip out of memory
like an accident;
to gather time within
and leave, knowing.