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