Rikki Santer

Rikki Santer’s poetry has received many honors including several Pushcart, Ohioana and Ohio Poet book award nominations as well as a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Her twelfth poetry collection, Resurrection Letter: Leonora, Her Tarot, and Me, is a sequence in tribute to the surrealist artist Leonora Carrington and was recently published by the arts press, Cereal Box Studio. Please contact her through her website, https://rikkisanter.com.

Some Things I Encountered While Conversing

1

Thought balloons
can sparkle.

2

Silence
may masquerade
as effective
one-liners.

3

Everything he said
had an asterisk
after it.

4

Phlegm refrains
more fluid
with bourbon.

5

A shush
is a shush
is a shush.

6

When I tried
to reason with him,
spiders flew
from his mouth.

7

Videoconferencing
with myself
still requires
high angles.

8

Magic 8 Balls
and Ouija planchettes
pretend to care.

9

Semi-colons
evaporate faster
than ghosts.

10

Hiccups became
my savior
from tedium.

11

Her purring
adhered me
to the moon.

12

His penumbra
wrapped around me
like a boa.

13

I ended up
torturing the point
with precision.

14

At Porky’s
my intoxicated secrets
were squandered
in pig Latin.