the other day wandering
i saw a shape at property’s edge :
the seer
effigy in her pocket
baby on hip
from all the way over there she somehow told me
you
will conquer those
who would do you harm
she
moved
her entire
body
like
a tongue
if you tell your snake dream
she somehow said
you will quarrel
with the person to whom you told it
firstborn locates
the pages : buttery folds of mildew in the fifth chapter : a
crinkle or two, but
what does
this have to do with
counter-question : where did the storm originate
i think i know a fire
under the hood
death howl penance
i am wild in the belly but
this single body cannot replicate historical sound
a
scratch of sun :
let the glass fall
in pieces on the road
bear a bouquet of wire
fragments to me, my wonder
i live with you inside
wheat we were first
symbols
next paintings
finally we
are maquettes of our time
we are other people’s dark age
when i kiss
you is it someone
later’s laugh
i will take
you to a wide sea
some day :
smooth glass
from green
bottles : necklaces
for you :
our animals dragging
their hind legs
backward through
mud, up from the oil :
all is over
: the
horses
gone by
morning
take the space between
my hands & fill it with waste
the blister made by rubbing me
reaches capacity here :
on the radio
a retelling
of our nation’s story
a motionless fruit
hoisted
over the square
&
up the
flagpole starting to turn
[
these bullet silos ]
rolling
hill
of the body’s
cold
forelegs :
you are a
child
hemorrhaging
me
[ the growing hedge is useless
for
some years, during which time it needs
protection for itself ]
i’ve come too close to leave my pasture
full of
investments behind
i’m waiting for sound to stop :
the seer
in a pile
by the
silo i swear :
evenings at
the window : the same
window i’m
looking out of :
so
how—
she somehow tells
me when i was a child
a snake
licked
my ears clean & now i can truly hear
she
uses each limb as perimeter : spreads
the whole
of her skin across our portion of sky handing me chicory
[ she is
chicken wire casting
the
thinnest crossed shadows
into my
hands ]
now
i’m sleeping in outbuildings : corncrib
lettered
with message :
carry rattles around the neck
about the ankle
between the breasts & make
a circle of
rope around you :
coil
it like a snake
i
don’t ask him anymore
to stay here i release him to the goblet of
coming night
where it sits on stilts
leaned up against the barn
he would come up
meet me at the quarry
whereupon i would change
into a creature he could trap with paper
& then we would hold
our bones together
he would flay roots
if it brought him [ here ]
[ to this woody center; me ]
to
the corona, a blue
ring of coin-eating machines [ my mouths ]
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of Corduroy Road (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2020), Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013), winner of the 2013 Michael Rubin Book Award, and Tatted Insertion (2014), a limited edition letterpress chapbook with artist Leah Virsik. Her manuscript “Comfort" was a finalist for the 2019 Ahsahta Press Sawtooth Poetry Prize and the 2017 National Poetry Series, among several other contests. Sarah is also the librettist of Halcyon, a new opera about the death and life of a women’s college, currently in development with composer Joshua Groffman and producer Vital Opera. She lives in San Francisco, where she co-edits Drop Leaf Press, a small women-run poetry collective. More at sarahheady.com.