Sara: Poem 1

Do not worry for me, love.
I am nestled in the crook of someone else's young arms.
I have found ways to live with the parts of me you wanted to raze.

Do not worry for me.
For I am preoccupied with frivolity...
To be succinct, but with no discernible precisosity:

Adolescence: Egos of paper mache
Cars: Exhaustion and death
Sundry red: Parted lips, ripe fruits, unmentionables...

      Red, you exhaust me.
      Like I exhausted you?

Do not worry for me, love.
I am so busy, oh so busy, with salting soups and sidewalks.
I pay my bills, love, I do.
Mostly pay the majority of my bills.

Do not worry for me.
I am no longer the ever delicate nod to early senescence.
No, not entangled with creases on a page, rather part of script,
that I write,
line by line.

Do not worry for me, love;
I no longer worry for you.

3 to 4 nights a week

3 to 4 nights a week...

She laid on the floor of this strange, but known woman’s garage.

Darkness falling all over her. From the tips of breasts and nose to the backsides of calves and tucked shoulder blades.

There was the turn of gravel. The first two then the second set of tires grinding imperfection against imperfection. The grating against the grating. A normally dispassionate sound all of the sudden besot her with anxiety.

She placed her left hand against the corresponding temple in reactionary movement.

Sara felt hungover.

She had consumed more than her fair share, hadn’t she? And was lulled into the satiety of what it is to look like. Then because of his...

Nevermind.

That part does not matter.

Comfort seemed to beget conflict. She became restive imagining what else was out there beyond wooden towers. She was taken advantage of and took advantage. She said mean things and tried to justify them because they were true.

And then he used her, because he could, because maybe he needed her to assuage the drum pulse of loneliness.

And he justified it. Because she had been destructive and callous.

And she let him, because of the throbbing pulse of loneliness that was so resounding in her own heart it reverberated off of street signs and beleaguered ill deserving pedestrians on their way to buy thumb tacks and coffee filters. And there was so much pain that it hollowed her out and left a person that simply could not care.

Sara hurt herself.

She slit one wrist, she slit the other.

In the disquiet of night, she laid there bleeding to death until the morning came.

...so the left hand to the corresponding temple.

Two seemingly kindred shapes that fit like one palm falls into the other.

All of the sudden, disparate.

The sun touched the tip of nose, the top of the chest.

Sara awoke.

She opened her eyes only to find herself on the same grey cement floor. As in dreams, so in life.

The vibrancy of light drained, the sounds of day mocking her.

This was Sara.

3 to 4 nights a week.

The skillet toss

Sara was at this point where she realized she had a hard time taking in large doses of anyone apart from herself. 

She wanted so badly to revel in the details instead of being annoyed by how Henry cooked 2 eggs over easy every morning leaving the sulfurous smell lingering on the patio… that had once been her patio. Her sanctuary, now sullied by fucking eggs. Their bloody yellows marring her once pristine cast iron skillet she found on a trip from coastal Rhode Island to the sumptuous verdancy of Vermont.

It was a Memorial Day weekend and Sara had just graduated from college. She had taken the Bethel exit off of 89 in search of gas and found herself pulling over to examine the goods and finery laid out at a road side yard sale. The convocation of household superfluity was tended by two young women similarly dressed in blue jeans and once-white aprons folded in half and knotted at the waist. They could have been mother and daughter, could have been sisters. Their interactions and clear level of irritation with one another implied a generational divide. The older woman seemed to hover above in the atmosphere, while her younger counterpart hinted at a smirk and a half eye roll in response to seemingly innocuous exchanges.

Goods were laid out with such a delicate hand and carefully tagged with fragile ribbons tied to paltry prices followed by the yard sale subtitle commensurate with gospel, “OBO” (...or best offer). All was clearly suggestion as opposed to decree. Sara lifted the pan with her left hand with a necessary deliberateness.

She was shocked by its elephantine hulk.

It felt in part weapon, in part paperweight, and in part practicality for a young woman teetering on the cusp of something. Well, ...clearly something.

She remembered an ex-boyfriend telling her of the Lady’s Cast Iron Skillet Toss at the Blue Hill Fair. It was a traditional manifest of athletic prowess and brazen domestic chutzpah. One wayward attempt went into the crowd narrowly missing his father’s balding head. There was momentary feigned outrage from mothers with children, but most dismissed it with a shrug and sudden fascination with passing clouds. Apparently, risking accidental bludgeoning was perfectly acceptable in the face of considering abandoning a time honored tradition.

Sara pictured herself at the fair. Skillet in one hand, making revolutions with her unsubstantial body, mirroring the form she remembered watching discus throwers execute in high school track meets.

One revolution.

Two revolutions.

And then, a cutting release.

Clearly, Sara and this skillet were fated. In her imagination, they were already storied.

what desperation felt like...

she kept clacking her ring against the side of the plastic chair. she was a devotee of all things that tapped at the side of her temples. the ever-present tap, tap, tap echoing off the sides of brass door handles and linoleum floors. Sara was a pursuant of it all. she sought sanity when she felt unhinged, and a biting wound when life tasted all thoroughly, numbingly saccharine. she sat in the check in wondering if the ceiling fan tottering over her head would come unhinged on its next revolution.

one.

four.

seven...

nope.

this is what it felt like. what desperation felt like. watching ceiling fans and counting all of a life’s transgressions from one moment to the next as it rotated in its socket. she envisaged what had brought her here. to this moment sitting politely in a doctor’s office the right hand decorously placed on a knee and the left… the left hand with the incessant clacking.

Sara, Sara Elizabeth…?

her eyes panned left then right waiting for someone else to claim namesake, but no such luck. this was her generic moniker, two first names. who has a first name for a last name? it only lead to confusion and derision. she followed the white tuft down a dimly lit hallway illuminated only by lifesaver primary colored doors. the orange room.

Sara hated orange.

she remembered how her father used to roll his own cigarettes. she would watch the orange tip, the burning embers as he inhaled deeply between those self-incriminating mumbles… she wondered what he said out there. through the translucent window to that man's world on a december winter’s night all Sara heard were paper towels rubbing on a clean glass pane.

i can’t stop walking. seriously.

yesterday i started walking to georgetown and i ended up in virginia. i thought i was going in the right direction and then when i realized it had been two hours since i left, i began to have my doubts. then when i saw a sign that said “virginia is for lovers!”, i really started having my doubts. the thing is, i got scared. i realized i only had 2 pennies, a nickel, 1 quarter and a dollar bill folded up like a chinese football in my pocket.

that’s a dollar 32 in case you were keeping track.

i began to wonder if maybe i would starve to death. i went into the lobby of a motel 6 and they still had their continental breakfast out. it smelled like virginia slims… not the breakfast, the lobby.

(i didn’t think you could smoke in hotels?)

i got in line behind a thick man with dimpled thighs.

(i didn’t think men could have cellulite?)

i got an everything bagel with very little everything left on top of it. just a couple of poppy seeds. so really i guess it was just a poppy bagel. a sorry one at that.

maybe i should explain why i found myself in the lobby of a discount motel shoving containers of smuckers grape jelly into the front pocket of my overalls on a monday morning.

you see, i was sitting in psych 101 minding my business, just mindin’ my own damn business. and then i found a squished banana in the bottom of my bag. this always happens. i have very severe problems with squished bananas. seriously. like, nightmares. so then I am trying to discreetly sluge (sluge? yup, sluge.) a brown banana off the side of my macroeconomics textbook and wondering if i will still be able to return it to the bookstore at the end of the semester.

then in walks connor. i know connor because he lives down the hall from me and swears to god he is the only 19 year old male virgin left on the planet, but I told him that he’s not… probably, most definitely not the only one left on the planet.

he was all wide eyed walking to the front of the class, he whispered something in our professor’s ear and then we were told we should all evacuate. like the building? like the DC metropolitan area?

it's october 2001 and it seems like everyone is just waiting for the apocalypse. 

you could tell connor just wanted to yell, “just get the fuck out of here before this shit blows!!!”, but my professor feigned being an adult. we all kinda just looked at each other for a sec wondering if she was serious. “like, now”, she said.

so i guess that explained that.

i should have grabbed a buddy. you know, the buddy system is drastically underrated? it is more important to have a buddy when you’re over the age of 17 than it is to have one when you’re under the age of 9. i should have grabbed gertie saybrook’s arm, the girl that has tourettes and clears her throat all class long and said, “so we in this together, gert?”

but I didn’t.

so anyways, then it was just me fending for myself on the mean streets of alexandria, virginia living off of squished bananas, poppy seed bagels, grape jelly, and virginia slims.

good grief.

i once had a rose named after me and i was very flattered. but i was not pleased to read the description in the catalogue: no good in a bed, but fine up against a wall.

eleanor roosevelt

i would love to look in the mirror and fall in love.

i fall in love with others daily.

walking down the street i find myself admiring a delicate collar bone, tight rolled jeans, the way her hair falls in dark tendrils cutting from one side of the page of her face to the other. i fall in love with all of the intimacies that her presence affords the world.

as in relationships, so in passing.

i fall in love with the details.

i can see that in you and see that in her, and for myself, well, there is this vacancy.

i shirk vanity as i am consumed by it.

you know I cannot blame you, you American women. we beat ourselves up for being too attached to the slight build of delicate youth. the boyish hips, the mere suggestion of form, the slender way a thin one leans into the edges. but what we admire is the suggestion of a body as opposed to our obdurate existence.

i would love to be a mere suggestion, a cursor on a page, merely leaning into reality.