Hobble Creek Review
Hobble Creek Review
Cheryl Snell
The Natural Order of Everything


It’s a trick. The sun aims wide-eyed light
through gauze breezes to filter out the truth:
if your shadow is shorter than you are,
April is dangerous as August.

Staring birds gone quiet after a storm
open a row of beaks, expecting to be fed.
Beneath bloom-smattered branches, cats
twitch their tails, predator sinews quivering:
spring, sprang, sprung.

When prankster chipmunks trifle with a patch
of violets, an alarm of pheromones rises
through each stem and runs like a chill
down the pleated rows.

In their slim choreography, petal- heads turn
toward the light. The odor of fear is sharp,
the signal for help silent, and what plants exhale,
the animals breathe in.

I see there is no help for any of this.
I may as well start over.
Cheryl Snell has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times and is the
author of two chapbooks:  Flower Half Blown and Epithalamion.  She has work
forthcoming in Remark, Botteghe Oscure, and Small Spiral Notebook.  A novel,
Shiva's Arms, is being published this Spring.