by Angela Hoffman

Where there is sorrow there is holy ground.
~ Oscar Wilde

I have this hunkering for collaging 
on small pieces of cardboard or playing cards.
I scour magazines, junk mail, even the garbage
for images, torn pieces of paper, words that speak
lost among the discarded.
I rearrange the fragmented shadows 
from homely to lovely
until there is a tenderness in the chaos
until they feel just right, true, like devotion.
Reordered, there is a meaning
that explains what I know, but I don’t know how to explain.
I secure everything down, add paint 
leave open space for pause, for hope.
Embodied, there’s a recognition 
something soft amid the broken
like a holy card.

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Angela Hoffman’s poetry collections include Resurrection Lily (Kelsay Books, 2022) and Olly Olly Oxen Free (forthcoming, Kelsay Books, 2023). She placed third in the WFOP Kay Saunders Memorial Emerging Poet, 2022. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Solitary Plover, Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets’ Museletter and Calendar, Agape Review, Verse-Virtual, Visual Verse, Your Daily Poem, Writing In A Woman’s Voice, Moss Piglet, Amethyst Review, Orchards Poetry Journal, POETiCA REViEW, Wilda Morris’s Poetry Challenge, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. She has written a poem a day since the start of the pandemic. Angela lives in rural Wisconsin. 

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