Sally Bliumis-Dunn is the author of two poetry collections, Second Skin (Wind Publications, 2010), and Talking Underwater (Wind Publications, 2007). She teaches Modern Poetry at Manhattanville College and SUNY Purchase. She received her MFA in Poetry from Sarah Lawrence College in 2002. Her poems have appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, BigCityLit, Lumina, MARGIE, Nimrod, The Paris Review, […]
Over the tops of the lockers, I hear a woman talking, talking. Just the trail of her sentences, sentencing, sentencing her listener to the silence of a tree. While she, like an animal nose to the ground, follows the trail of her own words, her scent. Tense, she is on […]
She has painted her lips hibiscus pink. The upper lip dips perfectly in the center like a Valentine heart. It makes sense to me — that the lips, the open ah of the mouth is shaped more like a heart than the actual human heart. I remember the first […]
I don’t want to put my wedding dress away. I look at its silk embroidered bodice, and see the wet green lawn, our guests, my daughter in the bedroom mirror, weaving the last flower into my hair. I look at my cream-colored dress as a window, still left open, though time […]
Like a rain I feel but cannot see, the names of the dead, falling. Silences I hear between first names, middle, last are slivers of empty air between lines of rain. I want to be in these tiny silences that cannot hold their deaths but join them to all silence – […]
When the small hill of the mother’s body stayed still, I knew she’d died. Fanny sat in the woodchips beside her. When I returned with a ziplock bag, she lay right on top of her, making a soft, almost inaudible sound – her mourning strangely the same as any other I’ve known […]
I watch her differently now, frame her smiling in the kitchen doorway, blow drying her hair in the mirror; I add a random an image here, image there to the invisible album I keep of her inside me: riding a two- wheeler, gap of missing teeth. Now, as she readies […]
I once held an injured Monarch in my hands. I wanted to feel the softness of its wings. Touched, a fine orange and black powder coated my fingertips; and where I had fingered the wing the orange and black were smudged, and the tip, the very tip of the […]