Admission
“the truth is nothing more
than a puddle of clear water
dammed in ditch.”—Derek Walcott
The truth in drought, once rife with succulent
tongues, now dumb, yet not without meaning beneath diffident
gerunds, a confession so different
from ones to gods of rain, nimble and translucent
as morning mist, foreheads kissed by teasing misses, coy as blooming linens.
An inebriated sky, asphyxiated of its vapor and
even now, I do not dance for the rain as appeasement.
From above, a lone, valiant cumulus, worn out from
Distance like an ostomy releasing its injury; a downward sigh,
the cloudburst’s preponderant relief anoints me like a kingly oil.
I am repentant,
Sold.
In petto
On our wavelength of light, crestfallen,
Dim and lackluster,
My king humbles himself in our queen-sized bed,
Yielding to slumber.
The warmth of the flicker off his skin
Tests my thighs for a response
He doesn’t know he called for:
An arterial mist, like perfume.
My breathing is
Buoyant, matchless;
My heart steps to the side
To make room, my love.
Walcott’s White Egrets offers a celestial exit
Tucked behind snow-stuffed skies of March, up
To the crescent moon trumpeting for an old friend.
My rib cage is driftwood to straddle;
Secure from the irresistible surge of
Blood, from many waves of blue
Liquid love effused from self-abuse.
My love is safe with me.
My love, invisible,
Heady love—halting love
Supplements my book before bed.
Driven
My crow’s feet and all
my years have elapsed in young orbits.
As I head on, the segmented rubber neck on the northbound side
beeps and lays on distress signals,
about to take a nose dive
southbound towards the detour.
The car’s cabin is tentative—
50, sometimes 45 if it drifts.
Heating coils are taut like
a flushed face. Salty back windshield,
ice crust sweats to tears.
Laws of motion run forward with ferocious veracity
while I still feel the wheel, a slippery grip on a phantom first lover’s form,
a scintillating side line. Surrender to forgetting
February; blur into rearview.
Laws of motion run backward with license and restriction:
corrective lenses for 20/20 vision.
So worn out, so tired,
what lies immediately ahead is relegated to the periphery.
Silhouettes on the roadway?
Steering askance,
I plow through them all,
under the old and over the new,
tantamount to trampling down
shadows that empathized.
I Spar by Myself
(originally appeared in Verse Magazine in May 2014)
All humans live in air, not on ground.
Formed from soil, float around.
Scattered brains, mind contains
follies of thoughts, volleyed.
Hey, she, they:
Are ideas conveyed
In terms of
Weight, in “is per are,” or is/are.
No drying, no crying.
All humans glide together.
Pulled towards one another.
If one goes home=the other goes home,
Then both are home.
If one goes out=the other goes out,
Then both are out.
If one spills…
…then the other is separate.
The one cannot flow into the other.
The other will always be dry.
It’s like when a vase gets snatched up just in time
when the wine spills across the table. Spills always cry. Vases are dry.
Thus, one can never assume that the other thinks or talks about him as much…
…because he doesn’t. For, every single mention of A is equal to the half-mention of B. If your name starts with T, he’ll only cross the smallest one when balancing his checkbook.
Meanwhile, the one is dreaming about the other every single night, and he clamors
for sleep. As a result, one must learn to deal with the newly-acquired
irrelevance. How to be irrelevant…without crying.
Smiling while dialing the morgue.
***
Sarah Kersey is a poet and musician from New Jersey. Her work has appeared in Yellow Chair Review, Squawk Back, The Harpoon Review, Verse Magazine, and other publications. She will soon be an x-ray technologist. Sarah’s personal blog can be found at rest-harrow.tumblr.com
*Featured Photography provided by Melissa Libbey*
SICK LIT MAGAZINE 