Three Poems

Poetry by Tom Snarsky
the intimacy of the enter click, 2025, by Janne Marie Dauer. Copyright/courtesy the artist.


Specimens


The black scoter dives under the water
like when they leave you alone at the doctor
with the depression screener

and to take off your pants.
The internet really doesn’t think
I want to see information about cruelty

in animals, only cruelty to,
a great example of customer service
telling on itself.

I really did enjoy the gas station
barbecue, despite the day after, the beans
in their little cups the same size

as the sample one I left in the metal cabinet
after writing my name & birthday

American Gods


eBay collectors
spend thousands on dollar bills
with printing errors

Variform Dr


How much of the area is
Historic Orchard Area, the sign

makes me wonder. How much
could they spare

from the thresher
of development, that thing kids do

in stages, little griefs
of knowing more,

coming to understand
what adults do all day

and what they don’t. My whole moral
imagination is, is it like this

for you too, a kid
saying sorry when they don’t want to

Tom Snarsky

Tom Snarsky is the author of Light-Up Swan and Reclaimed Water, both from Ornithopter Press. His book A Letter From The Mountain & Other Poems is forthcoming in 2025 from Animal Heart Press, and his book MOUNTEBANK is forthcoming in 2026 from Broken Sleep Books. He lives in the mountains of northwestern Virginia with his wife Kristi and their cats.

Janne Marie Dauer

Janne Marie Dauer combines comics with painting. She moves between the two areas and playfully explores various narrative structures in these media, which influence each other. In doing so, she focuses her artistic gaze on what she herself describes as the “mysticism of the everyday”. She very often uses the airbrush technique. In this way, the artist creates impressions of blurriness and softness in her drawings and paintings, which are often based on photographic sources of inspiration. An interplay is created between sharpness and blurriness, foregrounds and backgrounds, between suggestion and clear line.

Dauer was born in Göttingen in 1995. She lives and works as a comic artist and painter in Vienna.

She began her studies with Hendrik Dorgathen and Aisha Franz in the illustration class at the Kunsthochschule Kassel. In 2019, Dauer received the first Lion Feuchtwanger Scholarship from the Stiftung Kommunikationsaufbau and spent a writing residency at the artist residency Art OMI, Upstate NY. Since 2022, she has been studying in the Painting and Animation department with Judith Eisler at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. 2024 she received the Media Fellowship of Nationalparks Austria and was part of group exhibitions at Kommunale Galerie, Berlin and Picture Theory, New York.