Cheryl Clark Vermeulen, a Midwesterner at heart, has lived in Massachusetts since 1998. She earned an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop after working in non-profit organizations, and is now an Assistant Professor in Liberal Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Poetry Editor at Pangyrus, and mother of twin boys. Her poems and translations appear in Caketrain, Split Rock Review, TWO LINES Online, Solstice Literary Magazine, DIAGRAM, Thermos Mag, EOAGH, Inertia Magazine, eXchanges, Jubilat, Third Coast, admit2, Dispatx, Propeller Quarterly, among others, and the anthology Connecting Lines: New Poetry from Mexico. Her other chapbook is called Dead-Eye Spring (Cy Gist Press).
Speak the Dead
I am going have gone
lip on any travesty
that will carry me
and in stride I watch
people meeting or
spitting open I grow
daylight in a rock
known only as day go
gossamer go unknown
into a child I made
whose paper flowers
rustle at night
I am not all that outgoing
I sucked up the well
though they’ll go
more or less
mealy and alone