Aria
I would sing if it would let this headache loose, somehow. Out of my head.
Right now, my mind is the swirling nighttime of an unfrozen river in January, dammed
and churning against itself in a storm. Also: something dark, packed in, untested,
hungering to be crushed; a spoonful of peppercorns overturned on a table. A blood
blister’s unwelcomed patience. an almost silence. wad of potato chip wrapper crushed
beneath a bus tire. a kind of aching mess: the stink of pen ink. yards and yards of
sloppily coiled electrical cord. anger spit imperfectly into a second language. damp, mute
asphalt between rainstorms. cold cauldron. the internet’s heavy, cold hum of text and
empty prayers. the way an evening stretches its long, strong arms and keeps itself tucked
in your parents’ musty fluorescent-lit basement, forever like formaldehyde,
where your tiny, fluttering life paces inside your ribcage and you stare out
an empty, night time window and pray for the darkness, or something, to take you in.
Postcard from Conil, Spain
Dear Future Sarah:
I’m here at the ruffly southern edge of the Iberian Peninsula,
where the Atlantic and Mediterranean tickle one another’s bellies
and roll back and forth against each other like children
giggling at a sleep over party.
It’s evening, and there are waves, broad and warm,
washing in and away like thin, swishy tablecloths, or bedcovers,
hiding and unveiling this beach’s golden secrets—
clam shells, wet and clean and shining under a low,
tangerine-juice sun. There’s gobs of them—sandy,
orange-brown fans spilling out from my pockets.
All the saddest need of the ocean’s deepest blue
comes in and back in, tugging at my ankles.
The cool, windy closure that evening brings
is beginning to wash against the warm blue edges of the day.
A warm-cool, gold-lit loneliness washing my toes at sunset.
My black jeans’ damp weight slowly climbing my knees.
The hope in my hair; the salt and wind in my hair. Remember
Right Now: Everything sticky with the kiss of the sea.
Love,
Sarah in the present
Midnight
Maybe you heard a poem or two and now you think I’m deep and want to go out.
You can’t just wander in here, uninvited and unprepared.
You will shiver and spit on my streets; you will open and
close your eyes in the darkness and wail for sunrise.
Watch my heart’s uneven nighttime hours unraveling their hope,
and the sadness will hold you, accidentally, like insomnia.
Maybe you will want out, but the door won’t be so simply hinged and
door-knobbed anymore. I am much too big to fit within your palms.
I am Night—its cold empty streets with one tin can rattling
down the road outside your window. These ticking minutes.
Sorrow like bed sheets. A floodwater of despair slowly creeping
up the legs, up the tender notches in your spine. The aching chill before sunrise when the sky groans a thin blue hum against the dark earth’s turning.
Maybe you see hope here? Just sit with me awhile, in your warmest clothes,
wrapped in a blanket. Come expectant, and bring patience.
Gaze into this empty sky until your eyes adjust and maybe you’re ready to wilt,
but just wait. There are things to see in this dimness. Suddenly, everywhere,
Stars.
Inside I am a midnight sky. You can stay for a bit, you’re welcome.
You are. Come find the constellations marching their
epic loves and battle songs and family huddles in wide arcing promenades.
Just stay with me, please. I’m here, waiting for the sun to rise.
Will
I will tell you the truth.
Some days, the loudest thing any body can say goes crawling
in my veins, thirsting to take me into its sprawling, dark universe,
trying to whisper its gaping sink-holed earthen silence into
my world. Some days, I wish to leave. Behind me:
A darkness for anyone to peer into from a trembling edge and wait
for some excuse to turn away
to waft itself up through the cold.
Someone, ask: What hurts so much that
it can’t be mouthed into the gentle scrape of words.
What truth was it that could not surface without erupting?
And now only the silence ringing like a white-knuckle punch
in your ears.
Violence begets violence begets
Some days look like there’s only one way to say it
so that someone looks up. violence begets
violence begets violence begets violence begets violence begets...
Let me choose
my legacy more
carefully, I pray into my self—
my wounded cathedral, shattered wood, acned paint echoing
with mold fumes and despair. Somewhere, here,
there is light.
One day, while pulling apart the rubble of broken things
heaped in my ribcage, I realize my fingertips are still soft. Rummaging
though the cold, another day, an old familiar song finds its way into my bones and becomes a warm hum in my mouth. Some things grow familiar. Every day I’m trapped here, bucking and reeling to avoid the histories tracing their long fingers down
my spine or along my shoulders’ bladed, wing-shaped ridges and what
I find, when I stare up into the rafters of my memory, straining for an escape hatch,
or maybe just a machete, is my own self: My elaborate architecture--mine.
My two feet planted in my thick ash and disaster.
The stretched
whine of my selected silences. The sobs, individual, trembling like ocean,
mine, creep toward me, barefoot
like children, warm as saltwater, clutching my wrists, pulling at my clothing,
saying here--yes, here. this place is still home.
Today, they push the windows open and here
somehow, April afternoon tumbles in:
a scent of mint leaves and orange blossoms
and here
I am. My soft hands. My strong lungs. Breathing.
Unpaid Debt
