Tricia Knoll
Tricia Knoll lives in Vermont in tune with snow, heat domes, and maple syrup. Her work appears widly in journals and in nine collections, both full-length and chapbook. Books out in 2024 include Wild Apples (downsizing and moving 3,000 miles from Oregon to Vermont) and The Unknown Daughter, persona poems of voices reacting to the Tomb of the Unknown Daughter. Her 2018 collection How I Learned to be White received the Human Relations Indi Book Award for Motivational Poetry. Knoll is a Contributing Editor to the online journal Verse Virtual. Right now she’s writing prose poems. Website: triciaknoll.com
Tristesse
Sadness sounds softer in its French synonym. Mélancolie more like unsung song.
Whatever it is, I stuff it in a duffel bag over my left shoulder, filled with things like worn-
out negligees, whale swizzle sticks, sand falling from beach-combing sandals, gel pens
empty of green ink, my last dog’s collar, and echoes of owl calls. When the minister said
that at the bottom of despair is a soft pillow, maybe a silk pillow, that cushions free-fall,
I envisioned splat. He meant plump it up. Hold onto your children fed or tucked in.
Friends. Do whatever you can do so no one suffers in the cold. Maybe he meant hang out
there, rest. Sleep on a blue pillow. Best never to stir the cocktail. Today I shovel paths
through two feet of snow for my very small dogs who would otherwise be buried. They
frolic when I toss light snow in the air. I straighten to ease my back. Fresh flakes wet my
hair, eyelashes, tongue. A memory as a little girl in an Illinois blizzard. So cold the
beauty. Pillow of snow.
