THE MUSEUM ISSUE

Cheryl Snell

 

Guarding Ginevra
DaVinci, National Gallery


Along the corridors
the murmuring never stops.

Ginevra against the junipers,
her hair still alive.

Her sullen mouth is saying something
about resurrection,

something I cannot hear.
I am cordoned off

by velvet ropes and centuries of loss,
while she, irises turned inward,

can no longer see
the damage that distance does.

 

 

Cheryl Snell’s books include a novel, Shiva’s Arms (The Writer’s Lair Books), and four collections of poetry: Flower Half Blown (Finishing Line Press), Epithalamion (Little Poem Press), Samsara (Pudding House), and the forthcoming Prisoner’s Dilemma, winner of the 2008 Lopside Press chapbook competition. She serves as book reviews editor for Alsop Review, and blogs at http://shivasarms.blogspot.com and http://snellsisters.blogspot.com.

 

Published in Volume 10, Number 1, Winter 2009.