Arielle Lindstrom has performed a handful of times before a handful of people, normally in kitchenettes or corner cafes, once in New York City.  Her work has been published by Haggard & Halloo Publications, Wild Leaf Press and Chronogram. Though originally from a white house in Cornwall-on-Hudson, Arielle Lindstrom is presently living and studying in New Paltz, NY.  She wants your letters.

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Two Poems (July 20, 2010. Issue 19.)

Knots
 
When I was young
I couldn’t understand what God was
Where his hands were folded
Or how they grew up into everything
Of my childhood, I can only remember feeling awake
But my dreams were so real they raced me places
I hadn’t the worry then for heroes
I worshipped only my father when he got home from work
I couldn’t wait to see him
Days then were too sweet for me to describe
With the words I have now-
But watching the creek bend over
Borrowing its frogs
Feeling how the heartbeat filled the whole belly
The whole palm of my hand
My hands look so small when I press them together

From the library
I borrowed a book about making knots
Headstrong and stubborn like two fists on a tabletop
Knots that hold the wind back
And tell stories to its birds
I learned the language of tying loose ends together
How to make mercy at the pull of your hands
How to make rope promise you something
I borrowed fishing line without asking
I’d found it on a park bench
Carved my initials where the spool had been and ran home
I pulled a staircase from the ceiling’s pocket
Unfolded it before me,
I sometimes feel like I can pull this from paper
The walls of my attic creak like stiff suitcase leather
They sigh like forgotten maps,
all the places my mother never got to go
I crawled below rotting wood, drove my knees along the
floorboards
told a story to the boxes,
moved them all around
I tied everything together-
made a web of a room!
I prayed to a god to get stuck in there
So I could see for myself
His sad beard

Through a crack in the ceiling
a spider disappeared
She shoved mounds of dust out behind her
every leg moved to beat me
The dust settled, made me sleepy
I slept the way that a flower presses inside a good book
My web sulked down around me
Tucking me in, made me as pretty
As a Russian princess in a ballroom gown

At the Top of the House
 
In the heat of the attic
the maps sigh heavily
I am listening to the grizzle of your throat,
the row of your swallowing
A light bulb flickers hollow, above us
slipping down from the ceiling
the Housecat is prowling
with mouse bone puzzled in his stomach
he is disappointed still-
plotting to claw his way out
come the morning