In Red

Sarah Dickenson Snyder

Don't we all want to be hot?
Is a red dress a signal?

I've only had one.
My mother bought it for me
a different body ago.
I remember walking out of the dressing room,
her compliment surprising.
I still have it in my closet,
a long, flowing redness
I remember loving.

And now I am in another dressing room
wide enough for my mother’s wheelchair.
She is trying on a pink sweater, and I am helping her
the way I used to pull my children’s arms above their heads.
I think I was beautiful once, she said.

Caution: we are original containers
that will wrinkle and dry. All skin thins.
Caution: contents need love.
Caution: we might be at the edge of never.
Caution: memory has its own darkness and light.
Caution: contents can be dangerous.
Caution: beware of cautionary advice.

You can always create newness
out of what you unearth
in the wake of the living.

Interview by L. Valena
February 26, 2025

Can you start by describing the prompt that you responded to?

It was a piece of artwork that was a reworking of a cardboard packaging, I think from Wendy's. The artist had created this very stylized fashion illustration with the packaging, and included some of the text from the packaging, like “contents hot.” I received the piece while I was in Rwanda. For me, sometimes looking at an image over and over and not writing anything, but just thinking, can be super helpful. All I had was my phone and my journal. It was a very interesting commentary about what we're packaged in, and the cautionary language that we hear in our heads, or from our mothers.

What happened next?

I think it was when I was on the plane home, I started looking at the image and just writing down some notes. When I got home, I printed out the image. I liked staring at it, as if it was right in front of me. I never quite know what I'm doing or where I'm going. For me, poetry just kind of emerges. I like to think of it like a Polaroid image. I just put things on paper, and gradually the words kind of take me into a certain direction. At that point, what I'll usually do is transcribe what I've written in my journal into a word doc. I'm not a fast typer, so I usually use the microphone to say what I have on the paper. Then once I have those words in the document, I can do the puzzling and thinking. What are these words trying to help me figure out? Sifting through and thinking. For this piece, it took a while to figure out how I wanted it to look on the page, the order of the different stanzas, and see a progression of where I was going and what I was thinking of.

I love the juxtaposition between some of the ideas in your piece. That line about having a red dress “a different body ago,” but also that idea that we're still in our original containers. Isn't it crazy that we're in the same bodies that we were in as children? That doesn't make any sense. We were on swing sets.

I know, it doesn't make any sense. We were doing cartwheels. My daughter is pregnant right now, and thinking about how this being growing inside of her was actually inside of me. When my daughter was inside of me, the egg that produced the child that's inside of her right now, was actually inside me first. From something so unbelievably tiny to a full human being.

Wow. That is WILD. And such an interesting point. We keep growing and changing, and yet we have these attachments to how we've been in the past, and that's complicated as well, isn't it? Especially in our society.

The fact that I still have that red dress hanging in my closet is so interesting to me. I haven't worn it since my early thirties, when my mom bought it for me. I love that I still think of it. The woman in the prompt is so sexual and interesting, I just wanted to keep looking at her. So beautiful and elegant, kind of what we all want to be. That question at the beginning of the poem, “Don't we all want to be hot?” I think we all do. And I love that word “caution” in the piece. Repeating caution, warning, red light, red dress, stop, think.

I also loved that line, "Caution, beware of cautionary advice."

Yeah. I don't know, the poem wanted to be a little bit funny. I thought of ending it there. But then that other little piece came to me, and it seemed so much really about what Bait/Switch is doing. We're taking something that we're given, and making something else out of it. It almost continues to extract beauty out of what is challenging, what might be hard, what we have to be cautious of. This idea of creating something new, something that's been reignited, something that is also alive.

Right -- what you call “in the wake of the living.” That's such an interesting way of talking about reality. That we're all just kind of charging through our days on this planet, making stuff and breaking stuff. Making messes and cleaning it up, talking to each other, giving and receiving cautionary advice. But out of all of that mess, new things are being generated constantly.

Particularly with Bait/Switch, by the way. I feel so lucky to have been able to participate a few times. It's just so fun and clever. It's almost like we're on another plane, and other people maybe don't understand how fun and compelling it is to do this. I don't know what it is inside of me that just jumps at the chance to do things like this. Those of us who are making art in some way must be tapped into something, and I feel so lucky to be tapped into it.

It's always so wonderful to talk to artists in this project who are open to receiving the call and running with it. It's like a tidal wave or something that kind of rushes in, and can lead you to places unexpected.

Always unexpected, I think.

Yes, and not everyone is actually open to moving through that process fully. So good on you!

For me, it's always about the unexpected. It reminds me of that Robert Frost quote: No surprise for the writer (or painter, or whatever), no surprise for the reader (or listener, or observer). If I'm not surprised by where something goes, then how can I expect someone who is reading my work to be surprised? You really have to allow yourself to be surprised, which is kind of interesting. That intention is just to unzip, open, see what comes in, and allow yourself to even go there, no matter how crazy it is. Allow it to enter. Or be pulled in?

Yeah, I don't know which it is either. Sometimes it feels like both. Do you have any advice for another artist approaching this project for the first time?

Yes. Just do it.

Call Number: O130VA | O131PP.snyIn

Sarah Dickenson Snyder has written poetry since she knew there was a form with conscious line breaks. She has three poetry collections, The Human Contract (2017), Notes from a Nomad (nominated for the Massachusetts Book Awards 2018), and With a Polaroid Camera (2019). Recently, poems appeared in Rattle, Lily Poetry Review, and RHINO. sarahdickensonsnyder.com