Letter To My Reticent Self // Kristy Snedden

 

Letter To My Reticent Self

You, living on the spine of whatever book

falls into your hand, cheering on the next word,

even the familiar ones that don’t scrape up against your bones.

You, I want to know you.

Spilling out poetry in the middle of a hike, battling 

soundless, coarse dreams that would embarrass our mother

if she was alive. You who murmur under your breath 

about unzipping a culture. 

You, I want to know how you open your paints when I would sleep, 

how you, stoic, even at the edge of your own cerebellum,

ignore the binding of your throat to tell me today was a bad day. 

You, I want to know

how you wake up between each snapshot

how even malnourished you grow your hair long and curly,

as if your brain’s sensory gate is teaching your locks to say, 

Come here! Come here!

What in you, without reparation, grew  a branch from the soil?

You, your fingers fisted as a condition of courage. 

You, my inner insomniac grateful when night falls. 

You, reading the last sentence with a satisfied sigh. 

Kristy Snedden is a therapist and poet whose work is widely published nationally and internationally. Her poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net and a Pushcart Prize. Kristy is the winner of the Small Orange Emerging Woman poet prize (2023). Her poetry has been short-listed for the Headlight Review Chapbook Prize and the Flume Poetry Prize and won an Honorable Mention in the Writer’s Digest Annual Poetry contest.  She spends her free time hiking near her home in the foothills of Appalachia and listening to her husband and their dog tell tall tales. 

Honorable Mentions of the Month
These are poems that stood out among the beautiful submissions we received in June 2026:
• “They” by R James Sennett Jr

• “The Life of Memory Abecedarian” by Dylan Baermann

—Selected by Sharisa Aidukaitis

Editor’s Note

“You, my inner insomniac grateful when night falls. / You, reading the last sentence with a satisfied sigh.” Kristy Snedden, through a series of intimate apostrophes, examines emotional restraint, creativity, insomnia, and grief, while approaching the self with tenderness and curiosity.

— Daniel Aôndona