Wendy McVicker
Wendy McVicker has lived in the Hocking River floodplain for over 30 years, has been an Ohio Arts Council teaching artist for about 20 years, and is current poet laureate of Athens, OH. She shares an old house in an old neighborhood with her spouse and a Hemingway cat named Dora. She is missing her grown sons during covid.
Vanishing Act
Blood was the story
we couldn’t tell: cut lips,
loose teeth, quivering
knives and the hand up-raised.
Then the other blood, almost
black, flowing from deep inside
No one told us
about that, only
that it was better
to have it than not
Shame covered everything
with its hot yellow cowl
and cowed we scuttled
through crowded rooms, trying
to be invisible. In time
we let our own blood,
in time we stanched
its flow with hunger.
We wanted only
to disappear
into icy light,
the grated hum
of silence
The Bones are Blue
The bones are blue
and come from the sea.
Or gold, smoothed
(or roughened) by sand.
They are dream-bones,
not to be seen.
But she craves them,
she knows their beauty,
their latent power.
She hears their song
a distant strum
of gold wire,
a chime as dry
as desert wind.
The bones are vessels
for carrying emptiness
and she wants
an end to wanting
Sheila-Na-Gig online
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