When I was a kid in Brockport, we'd get so much snow you could make angels by lying on your back and drawing your arms from your sides together over your head. While the others would flop down in the powder and flail their arms into wings, I'd stare at the brittle blue
bright above the hushed white. Shadowless, I'd stand there, frightened, fearing the depth of snow, afraid of darkness, afraid of stillness, afraid if I lay down I'd be swallowed cold. After a while I'd let go . . . and for a brief moment not be able to move.
It's the same feeling I have now when I'm waking, can't move, and think I've died.
INVENTORY: WORD WORKS BOOK TITLES
Eight pale women bodies we were loaned flesh that was chrysalis.
Crow's eye view following Fred Astaire stealing mangoes.
Judging the distance toward desire looking for divine transportation.
Upon waking the stones remembered the last heat.
Altered in the telling a diamond is hard but not tough stalking the Florida panther.
Black book of the endangered species counting bad names for women woman from Memphis.
A two-time recipient of George Washington University's Jenny McKean Moore scholarship for poets, Tod Ibrahim has a Master's Degree in Liberal Arts from The Johns Hopkins University and a Bachelor's Degree in English from the University of Maryland at College Park. At Maryland, he was Poetry Editor of the Calvert Literary Review. Since 1995, Tod has served as a reader for the Washington Prize for poetry, which is sponsored by The Word Works. In 2001, he joined the "Pick-A-Poet" program at elementary schools in Arlington, Virginia.
