What dark forces at my door

taste of persimmon and amaretto

sour on my lips. These snipped images:

swan boats gliding to the moon, she,

adrift and crooked in lilac threads

strung between us, you, dandy,

drunk, daydreaming, hide pasted

into scrapbooks, racked and dried

pretty as a cat, through rifts in shadow,

I reach for radiance

from eleven steps of a rusted ladder. 

From the Press:

Heidi Joffe's Scrapbooks is a lush and uncanny collage of imagery—a poem that feels both tactile yet spectral. Its language folds inwards into a delicate origami with each line revealing a new folded layer of recollection, desire, and decay.

There's a tension between preservation and erosion here: the "snipped images" and "lilac threads" become relics of a connection pieced together from what remains. What begins as an act of memory turns elegiac, where Joffe's words seem to shimmer with what's lost but still luminous.

I think we can all relate to Scrapbooks and the way it becomes a vessel for radiance salvaged from rustic beauty and ruin cohabiting in one fragile frame.

About the Author:

Heidi Joffe(M.Ed. MFA) is a poet and multimedia artist who crafts with fibers, clay, and words. She writes essays and screenplays, but poetry is her sustenance. Her publication homes include Panoply, The Opiate, Sheila-Na-Gig, Gyroscope, Pine, Mountain Sand and Gravel, and Hercules Press. She received her MFA from Pacific University. 

Where to Find:

Website: hjoffepoet.com