Sally Rosen Kindred

To Dorothea Tanning

(after “The Truth about Comets,” 1945)

Because you painted mermaids in the snow
and because                the mermaids painted their eyes to the bloom-pelt sky          for comets
I want to lie down with you

in 1945            I want to rise
from Decembered loam          where earth needs your hands            your vast
hive of clouds and                   tender I

want us to bear witness                                   our tails
furled into frost           like the rushlights
and ice flanks

of comets

which climb a shine                and flare
like a cluster of winter stairs              If to see
is to swim I want

to butterfly       from brute human years         into silvered breath
to reach           through your dusk’s                soft hair
to gentle our coats      warm us back from War:        Dorothea,

galactic—         shoulder us far            spell us away              tell us
comets            and velvet the truth
of our cold                  changing skin

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Sally Rosen Kindred is the author of three poetry collections: No Eden (2011) and Book of Asters (2014), both from Mayapple Press, and Where the Wolf (Diode Editions, 2021), winner of the Diode Book Prize and the Jacar Press Julie Suk Award. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Kenyon Review Online, Plume, Pleiades, Shenandoah and New Ohio Review.