Subject: Death
by Sarah Dickenson Snyder
When I met her,
she was sad to leave
New York—her friends,
art classes, her life. She spoke
about a family steeped
in Orthodox Judaism,
her father a cantor looking like a pope
in the photograph—
pointed white hat, white robes.
But I don’t believe in the stories—
do you? she asked. No, but I like them,
I said, thinking of the young, pregnant,
unmarried woman who had quite a story.
What do you think happens after death?
she asked. I shrugged, No one knows.
Maybe I’ll come back as a bird, she smiled.
Maybe she has. For a second,
one just hung on the meshed screen
at my window.
About the Author
Sarah Dickenson Snyder has three poetry collections, The Human Contract, Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera, forthcoming in 2019. Recently, poems have appeared in Artemis, The Sewanee Review, and RHINO.