| Frost like gauze clings to the panes, making of the house an intimate winter. Snowbitten, pillows singe with chill, staggered in ascending order across the headboard. There’s a lead white weight to night – desire for ice, desire for knives, the wish to wake, leashed by the keenest need to lie still, swaddled damp in sheets. Time has her spite; past sweetnesses render their rude corrosion. At dawn wind splinters the windowsill and I would rise to leave these chambers but two lips vise down on my poor purse of blood until I tilt full sick and dwarf the sun. |
Sarah J. Sloat has worked for a news agency in Germany for
over a decade. Before that, she had jobs as a teacher, a dog-sitter, a
NOW canvasser, an editor, a temporary secretary and a reader for the blind.
Sarah has poems in the Fall/Winter issue of West Branch. |