Poetry By Kristy Snedden

Paul van de Velde CC



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The Voice of God

This is a summer of such desolation that her body 
wakes on an August night and buckles itself into the old ford, 
drives ten hours to Jackson Square and drops dollars 
in the trombone player’s jar just to shimmy up the slide, 
around the turn into the bell, wait patiently 
for the monophonic voice, its heavy, dense, weight.





Things I Didn’t Do To Heal The World & Things I Did 

                              after Amanda Gunn

I didn’t heal the boy next door paralyzed by a motorcycle or befriend the pimple-ridden girl in seventh grade, could not console my best friend, pregnant at fifteen, didn’t look at the homeless mothers lined up on Peachtree Street or steal the medicine in the crow’s nest at the top of the tree when I was eight, never told my ninth grade English teacher how she saved my life. Missed opportunities: I couldn’t get the sleep out of my eyes when the pilot woke us to the brightest northern lights he’d ever seen, I lay paralyzed with the legless while I watched the nightly death counts out of Viet Nam, left Baldwin’s Collected Essays under my bed for twelve years, to be honest, couldn’t bear it, that yawning ache inside my dead brother, didn’t welcome him in time even though in the year before he died I sent him playlists and burnt CDs, he wasn’t keen on technology, I even rode on the back of his Harley looking for home in Chino Valley, didn’t know where excitement ended and panic began 

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after he died I missed him, paid homage on the eighteenth of each month and kept my job as a therapist, held a teenager whose favorite sister was killed by a stray bullet, let foster children look into my eyes and order me around. I was a dinosaur and a rabbit, once a shark in the bathtub. I paid my dues to NPR and to the crippled, on auto-debit, threw my Italian ice cartons in the right bin. Every full moon my breath was a blanket to the addicts who found me, a balm to their yearning. I was educated by their claimed sobriety and nightly doses of Delta 8, how else to sleep, and where others turned away I slid into the silence of Paris after the train bombs, fed the street urchin croissants and coke, and just this year I watched someone’s daughter go backwards in time, her slow decline, held hands when the mother muted herself and on the eighteenth of each month, I sit under any night sky with my brother in his black t-shirt, cigarette pack rolled in the sleeve, lighter in the front pocket, that broken tooth, that blue tattoo. 



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Kristy Snedden (she/her) has been a trauma psychotherapist for forty-plus years and writing poetry since 2020. Her work received her an Honorable Mention in the 90th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is a recent recipient of the Small Orange Press Emerging Woman Poet prize. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in various print and electronic journals and anthologies, including Contemporary Verse 2, storySouth,  Door Is A Jar, Pensive, Anti-Heroin Chic, Power of the Pause Anthology, Green Ink Poetry, and Snapdragon.  In her free time, she loves hiking in the Appalachian Mountains near her home in Georgia or hanging out with her husband listening to their dogs tell tall tales.