Sara Eddy’s full-length poetry collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024. She is also the author of two chapbooks (Tell the Bees, A3 Press, 2019, and Full Mouth, Finishing Line Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin. Find her here.
SLEEPOVER
We were teenagers, new friends
and we held our lives out to each other
like useful presents. You lived
in your skin with intelligence
and something like fear.
When I came to your house
I took note. Smells,
loves, aesthetics, tone.
But that night when you
came into the room
with blood on your face,
not crying, calm, no big deal,
and I heard your father
heavy-boot his way through the house,
air cracking, doors crashing,
I did what I had to do, I called
and my father came to get me.
I should have taken you with me.
IN THE BARN
There were always kittens at one farm or another.
One year I was 6 and my brother took me to a magic barn crowded
with towering mazes of haybales where kittens scampered
and hid and purred. There were other children.
We giggled and named the creatures—Blacky, Tiger, Snowball—
stupid names; stupid children. The bales were good to climb.
I left my brother behind, and in the back of the barn way up
under the rafters far from the sun that looked in
through the big barn door and all by myself, I found
a dark circle, an evil array of fur.
What was there in the middle of all that fur that I can’t remember?
There was something there—skeleton corpse skin sac viscera—
but it erases to a smudge in my mind, now. I remember
not crying, feeling hollow. Thinking this has changed me.
Thinking no one can know about this.
THEIR SMALL BODIES
It turns out one of the tricks
to raising happy children
is to hide from them
how precisely I imagine
their cruel demise every day.
Their small bodies lift
to the sky when a car
careens off the road; twist off
in the dust when a tornado
hits the school; fall head
first into open wells appearing
in the ground for nothing.
I’m Edward Gorey,
except the children are real.
Sometimes they press my cheeks
together to make fish-lip mommy.
I guess I wasn’t good at hiding
the carnage, though: my kids
feel as I do the whole world
spinning loose into chaos.
But each of them, also,
also, finds anchor
in music, solace in art,
system in language—things
that won’t protect them at all,
but might grant them just
a small, sacred deception.
The tornado blows
through town, leaving them
miraculously untouched.
56
I fell off the back straight into the maw of a new life, lacerated,
ribboned by the incisors of tomorrow’s jaw.
If I’m honest I may have fallen on purpose, but I’m not
honest—I lie every day, with such pleasure
my skin glows. I wear the wrong clothes for every season,
I never use turn signals, I’m constantly up or down
about 15 pounds. I keep a little torch in my back pocket
for nighttime walks with the dog, and for that guy with the beard.
It’s low on batteries, it’s gonna go soon. I’ll have to choose
between the beard and the dark woods, and I sure do love
night-witching with a wolf, soft-footed on pine needles
while my light makes mushrooms spark.
LETHOLOGICA
We need a new word for the firmamental sorrow
that falls over us when we remember
this world is dying a fast death.
It should be a word like mother or love,
food or grace—a word we know in our bones,
a word like bones.
I think we once had a word like this
that gave us the comfort of naming our doom.
We have forgotten it, forsaken it
for quicker words, kinder, duplicitous words.
PINWHEEL
The rain has me
dismal, dropping
days in bed.
The rain has me
and I cannot move.
Yeah, we fought
in the airport,
and you kept the cat.
Have you ever thought
about skin and weather—
how we prevent
and consume water,
heat, air? Have you
ever thought
about that day
and how the clouds
opened up inside me?
I wonder sometimes
if I want a pinwheel
for my soul.
It doesn’t matter.
The rain has me
now and I’m safe.