Box 5 - Triangles / Hope/Chest
Hope/Chest
Box 5 - Triangles
Teri Tacoma
Acrylic and Paper
Yours, if you’ll have it.
Trousseau built slow
over years, the same
thread pulled back upon itself.
A girl-child drags the sheets off her bed, lies quiet
witness to the storm at the crack of the bedroom door.
A grown woman lies naked, hands
twisted through a gifted handkerchief
like it is the mast that will save her
when the sea swells, empties, pulls away.
You imagine us two old women on a porch swing —
why do the lilacs smell of salt in all that sweet?
Down to three chambers now
(damp straw, hollow sticks, blackened brick)
but you show up with a rake and a hammer,
your lantern heart and a joke on your lips,
how you spent a week stuffing things into closets
before we tumbled into your bed.
We go to sleep knotted,
wake up and grow towards each other
in our separate days.
Teach me trust — not to search the sky
for an ending, but to know we will return
to each other and return again
all the while whole.
- Sarah Vickery
About the Creators
Teri Tacoma
Teri Tacoma has had a professional life as a goldsmith and graduate gemologist from 1973 to 2012. She relocated to Ipswich, Massachusetts from Napa Valley, California in 2022. She is currently designing jewelry, découpage, painting, and ceramics.
Sarah Vickery
Sarah Vickery facilitates the Ipswich Poetry Group and hosts Zumi's Open Mic in Ipswich and Topsfield. A fundraiser by day, she has deep roots in activist and artistic communities in Boston and the North Shore. Ipswich poets including Dorothy Laurence, founder of the Ipswich Poetry Group, have been among her most important teachers in words and life. Sarah believes everyone can be a poet. In addition to holding monthly open mics she is facilitating a series of community poetry writing workshops this year, thanks to support from the Ipswich Cultural Council. If something in this exhibit moved or inspired you, she invites you to reach out to ipswichpoetrygroup@gmail.com and join the workshops in September and November.