Canopy in Snowstorm, by Elizabeth Hoover

Canopy, by Saul Leiter, 1958.

 
Canopy in Snowstorm
 
A city has so many gawky purple secrets.
She’s like a churlish girl at a school dance
pulling you into a locker room, glancing
down the hall before making her exit.
 
Don’t tell anyone—we would hide in the wind,
watching the horizontal scurry
of a snow storm and all its flurries.
I slyly snapped my camera like an exaggerated wink
catching the low-slung canopy of white she wore
from behind a kiosk--Don’t tell, you wouldn’t dare--
while I waited for the storm to clear.
Now it’s hanging in a museum, sure.
 
You know secrets. How you hope someone’ll overhear
as you whisper oaths of silence in her purple ear.

Elizabeth Hoover

Elizabeth Hoover is a feminist poet who enjoys working on projects with a conceptual or research element. Her current project, Some Poems About Pictures  is a hybrid text that offers art as a space for resistance to and transformation of dominant gender narratives. A portion of that project was awarded the 2015 StoryQuarterly essay prize, judged by Maggie Nelson. Her poetry has appeared in [Pank], The Los Angeles Review, and The Pinch, among others. She is a freelance book critic and lives in Pittsburgh . You can see more of her work at ehooverink.com.