SHARON VENEZIO


[untitled]

To Francesca Woodman

where do you end and the world begin?

​you want to be wind    vapor
​half flower    half vase   

​wallpaper    tree bark    door
​you become line    shape

​you invisible the self


​we raise our eyelids to your frame

​in this one your nakedness crawls
​toward a white calla    you bend

​into our looking    watch us shift
​in our seat    as the lens eats you

​you are a brief installation of curved
​bone and wall

​jumping from a window
​you are both sidewalk    and falling

​did you think the camera would catch you?    

 

​Photo by Lauren Henley


 

Family Album

Here a cigarette dangles between her thin fingers;
​she sleeps through conversation and ash.
​Here she closes her eyes and the sea stops moving.

And here she is a boneyard of unspoken words,
​salt in the quiet throat of her marriage.
​Here she is the green whiff of childhood.

Here she is sparrowed at the edge of the earth,
​exiled in her dying skin.  Here, like sorrow,
​she is liquid in the bones.

And here is the day she will be gone, her eyes resting
​no longer upon the tulips, their white
​petals, like teeth, fall to the ground.

Here she is hair, and nail, and noise in the brain.
​And here, dear body, be still.  Time is the only lover
​that will touch her now.


 

​BIO

SHARON VENEZIO received an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State University.  She is co-director of the Valley Contemporary Poets and the recipient of the Mark Linenthal Award for her poem “Meanwhile.”  Her forthcoming collection, The Silence of Doorways, will be released by Moon Tide Press in March 2013.  Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Two Hawks Quarterly, Transfer, and numerous other journals.  She can be found at sharonvenezio.com.