[ Let’s Say Snow Falling In Your Mouth ] by Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller

Associate poetry editor Hannah Cajandig-Taylor on today’s bonus poem: I don’t see many co-authored poems with such vivid emotional resonance, but this piece is so colorful and dreamy. I’m completely taken with the surreal narrative that seamlessly floats between pills, corvettes, and the feeling of transparency. What a lovely piece. 

[ Let’s Say Snow Falling In Your Mouth ]

What does a mouth want? Let’s say snow
falling in your mouth. It clicks on and off

when you sleep—pills a color like the feeling
of people sleeping together in their coats,

other pills the color of corvettes and wedding
receptions, a red half-awake.

Some pills you collect and keep; you hold them
on, a natural at holding,

pulled flat as the sky in a movie,
the kind in your mother’s hand,

her cuticles clear and polished
as bird’s eyes staring at the ground.

Who is to say who understands.
Some pills make you

nice like someone saying How-are-you and answering Good-how-are-you? and them answering
Good.

Okay.

It is 1995.

The hawk finds the starlings
nested in the drainpipe.

Your mother runs her nails over
the one and only Earth of you.

Everything you want still
fits inside a keyhole.

You’re clearer than you’ll ever be.
There is a pill for this too.

---

While they’ve only met once, Sophie Klahr and Corey Zeller have been writing together for seven years. Sophie is the author of Meet Me Here At Dawn (YesYes Books); Corey is the author of You and Other Pieces (Civil Coping Mechanisms) and Man Vs. Sky (YesYes Books). Individually, they’ve been published in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Their collaborative work appears or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Four Way Review, The Southeast Review, The Rumpus, and Sixth Finch. At present, mercifully, they live in the same time zone.