Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Sarah Sarai, Three Poems


Sarah Sarai


In the Bakery

Out the gleaming window,
cynical scraps of gray snow prevail.
In the room, milk steams bitter coffee,
another comfort of metamorphosis.

Taxis beneath a flock of birds
fly by on wheels turning street to gravel,
gravel to air, turning.

You lived one life as a green blade of grass
whistling chlorophyll ecstasies
in your wide flat leaf.

O Cristo Redentor, overseeing Rio’s
blue uncertainty, extravagant instability,
our sibylline fears.

Loneliness is a fertile amphitheater
of consciousness,
a Pandora’s Box of the oracular. 

“Fauna of the night” [Freud] are
informants weary as a prophet
and free as a martyr.
 
Here by the warm sugar, nothing is
unyielding.  Out the gleaming window,
taxis fly by on wheels turning street
to gravel, gravel to air.


Wild Egress

The door is the shape of a bell.
No knob, no hinges, you kick
to get in. 

A run of smashing
your sneaker on wood and
you can say, “I’ve done it.”

The bell is the shape of
a paragraph supporting tones
steady as plainchant.

Notes dangle on the rough wool
of devotion.

Our song is the shape
of a proposition.

Its lyric of pleasure is
open to elements like
earth water fire air fury.


After the Plague Years

Narrow waist, soft rise
of a dimple, hips like
river banks sweet grass and
marsh, chiseled ivory dusted.
She sighs into her bed,
eager for the feel of
her husband’s clever muscles,
a home she’s always known,
for that catch in his eye as if
memory were sinister.
His foot cracks a bowl
the slave neglected. 
Cursing, Oedipus
encircles Jocasta’s heat.
Torches are dark.
Something is at the door.


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Sarah Sarai’s poems are in reviews including Boston Review, Gargoyle, POOL; in her collection from BlazeVOX, The Future Is Happy; in Say It Outloud: Poems About James Brown (Whirlwind Press).  Her fiction is in ragazine.cc, Fairy Tale Review, Tampa Review, The Writing Disorder, Storyglossia and others.
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RECONFIGURATIONS: A Journal for Poetics & Poetry / Literature & Culture, http://reconfigurations.blogspot.com/, ISSN: 1938-3592, Volume 5 (2011): Disappearance

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