I have stopped leaving this room
except for exigencies. Why bother?

Deadened clouds skate on the face
of the black rectangle every night

no matter what moves I make,
& somewhere up and out there

is a numb and strangely ovular moon.
It's all very far from me;

I wash my hands of all of it.
I watch the strange geometries

of strangers sitting tipsily
along the hypotenuse of Columbia Street,

laughing and singing happy birthday to Joan.
Joan is wearing yellow. While they all sing,

she gazes into the lush sinew of the trees.
A thousand years ago...

this street was just a brackish pool.
A thousand years from now,

serpents will bathe on the brick wreck.
But tonight... Joan and her circle

sag and slink into lavender flatness.
Soon they are specks, and then nothing at all.

Full fathom five thy father lies
of his bones are coral made
those are pearls that are his eyes
nothing of him that doth fade
but doth suffer a sea-change
into something rich and strange
Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act I, Scene ii


I was a blue baby.
Umbilical noose drawn so close,
a rope of blood. The starving air
never loved me.

Now my father is air,
all of them are in the graves
of the air, the transparencies.
I can only claw at the silence.

Dolmens of rain collapse
in the kitchen. Black coral rises up
out of the fridge, out of the cabinetry,
out of the thickening lung-mass.

I am ever that blue baby,
leasing breath from a sterile hand,
my hair silvered over like a frost -
my tattoos gathered like a frightened flock.

Sea-changes are coming.
My last thoughts today, that coruscate
from the obelisk of my spine, are of the woman
who slurred my atoms so carelessly.

Loose teeth rattle like fireflies shaken up in the jar - concussed against the side of the glass

We drip juniper boughs into the river
like
Pastries in
Warm churning
Brew

You may not have loved them the
way they wanted you to,
or needed you to.

That you thought you
loved them at all is really
all that matters.


Sara Fielder © Apr 2022

Impotent hands;
impotent hands and eyes;
imagination and conscience
birthing a scream,
but with such
clean and impotent hands and eyes.

In the witching hour when all the souls walk again
the dead mayor of Bucha and his dead children
will jump up suddenly, like Lazarus, just as
suddenly as they died. Grabbing their bicycles
by the handlebars they will follow the wisp home
they will live in their own house again,
as they always should have. None of us
can disturb them.

Bullets in their temples they will put wood in the stove.
The living can only watch.

Evil everywhere and not just bad mothering but, there,
breaking out over the treetops, gaudily lit,
like a carousel, our own grotesques
come floating into the world,
wicked colors playing on our swollen faces,
holding torches to light the marching way.

No, you know better.

The dead mayor of Bucha told me this:
If you were to prevent it, lying there upon a field in winter,
it would only take reaching down with one hand,
and scraping the snow with a fingernail.
The truth about evil is like the snow beneath your belly, the dead mayor of Bucha says.
It is in and under your body,
slick and cold.
Reach down and touch it.

i feel drunk
when reading about drunks
looped
no bracement
i look up from the book
it's 6:45 a.m.
i'm in the hospital cafeteria
nearly time for work

in a stranger
     i clock a face
                     struggling to become a face
publicly
            she breakfasts
bent under a hood of hair
(she's not sure what expression
                     to let be witnessed )
i dodge her glance

overloom
the windows
make a massive jet mirror
          reaching the full ballroom height
a shield onto hard darkness
   protected from a primal cavity
the patrons are shied in its casting
a smudging forms at its base
   the horizon beeking
   an easing hint of winters sun

the glow is wanted
          but it brings nothing new to its display
still a hibernal wash
i don't hum with these morning frequencies
they can be beautiful
but i pitch sickly
and i suspect
the stranger girl is also no dawn spark either

The spermicide in your voice
The sink drain spinning
     .After much coaxing


The hair clumps climbing in bromine drips

As the acid burnt label’s yellowing edge
Waits for  further  corrosion  in the cabinet

As we seek to photosynthesize.  Into greater     limbs reaching

We shed the jitters

Humble before the promise of our own smallness

We feel the growth in our bones.

Thin.

Not yet as a door.

Not as an ear.

Not yet as a scar.

Not yet as a shadow.

Not yet as a self.

Yet.

Yet.

The ebbing

Of your eager look

As we roll our eyes,

And are no longer noticed.

A Neon Splash
from a forgotten age
of cool and class

and jazz
palpable and complete
with curls of smoke

it's still there
you

are still there
it just takes a while

to notice what was once
so familiar so clear
and dear