Tricia Knoll – Two Poems

Coloring Postcards

Smorgasbord of mandalas, jellyfish and grasshoppers.
A rack of 144 gel pens, fifteen with glitter.

I can’t stay in the lines, reds drift over purples,
my hands pull smudges, why poems need edits.

You, at home, ill. You might like a bookmark
in the mail, made not well, just painstakingly

picking neon greens, how many luminous blues
fill in the scales of an unbelievable fish. 

 
Silence

Learned like the smell in the gutter
of an antique book in library stacks.

The rest of a throat clearing itself
of trivial orders of obligation.

The waiter who claims he’ll be ours,
hiding behind his façade of service.

Background puzzle of spring birds who call
names I do not know.

Naming waves in alphabetical order
instead of counting sheep.

The tattoo
that smells like after rain.

Tricia Knoll is an Oregon poet. Her work appears widely in journals and anthologies. She has a mild voice disability and has been writing lately about silence. Her poetry collections include Ocean’s Laughter (Aldrich Press, 2016) and a chapbook Urban Wild (Finishing Line Press, 2014). More at triciaknoll.com.