When I say I want to live in a tiny apartment in Manhattan with potted bonsai trees and a black and white ikea sofa.

When I say I want to live in a tiny apartment in

Manhattan with potted bonsai trees and a

black and white ikea sofa

I mean to say that I want people to mistake

my life for novella. I say a novella

because my flicker of existence does not

need a novel. I want people to hear

the last sentence and ask if there was ever anything more–

I want them to peel frantically through

the flyleaf pages looking for another piece of punctuation.

When I say “New York” I mean I want to live

at the threshold of myself

I don’t want to apologize

for my callouses or how I hold

my hands tight together as if

each step I take is some sort of prayer– I want

to wake up each morning unfurling like

crimson red autumn leaves and tossing

myself to drift between worn suede boots

and sneakers jogging in place at stop lights.

I want to smile at so many people

because I can’t stop each one to say

how damn beautiful they are that day

even if they are walking too fast in

shiny black shoes to see me

smiling at them. Even if they

look down at a green shopping cart

full of coats that were never new to them

because they think I want to talk to them.

I’m too much in awe to speak most of the time

so I only think of what I would say.

When I say “City” I mean I want to live in the heels

of wide-eyed three-year-olds

who wonder if skyscrapers are

as big as a T-Rex was and nibble at the corners

of bagels like a pigeon missing a toe.

When I say I want to live as a poet in Manhattan

I mean I love how the city lets me fade into

nothing but my own words.

I don’t have to be Sarah

I can be a girl who is stirring thoughts

with a thick wooden spoon

on a gas stove.

I’m carrying a secret between the jostle of the crowds.

My smile means I love you but it also means

I get to write about you– I get to imagine you

when I find a cafe to stop

and water color myself into the corner

to describe you in my little notebook

with the navy blue cover.

When I say I want to move to New York City

I say it because it’s the only way I know how

to say that I want be everything and no one.

I want to be slippers

and unworn sequin high-heels.

I want to be yellow stop lights

and chipped black nail polish.

I want to be coffee filters

and holes in the elbows of shirt sleeves.

I want to live in so much awe at everything

that my blood turns to mint tea

and I my pulse to trumpets

accompanied by mandolin.

 

 

 

The winking of

taillights makes me pounce at the

break pedal and I’m not

particularly fond of the act of driving a 1997 Oldsmobile down

the Pennsylvania turnpike.

I do like to be a tourist of small towns though.

An art critic of faded tooth brush factory billboards

Maker of postcards for places

who never bothered to print their own.

I love to imagine what it would have been like

if every Tuesday night after softball practice

in the seventh grade my mom

and I would have stopped at Marky’s Subs with the

blinking checked sign out front or

Russo’s Pizzeria– crudely painted red white

and green.

We have the same places in Kutztown but they

have different names and their own stories

blended in each corroded brick.

I wonder if I would have still liked to take the cheese off pizza

or learned to playe the trumpet if I would have spawned in the veins

of a different town.

Maybe we paint ourselves into whatever

stone settlement comes to know us.

I’m nostalgic for sidewalks I’ve never walked on

and street lamps that have never made my shadow.

I want you to know my streets because they’re

part of my own skin now– my past–

my breath is somewhere in the gusts

between the iron gated alleys.

Fallen factory buildings feel like amputations.

Everyone knows a place that memorized

the feeling of their bare feet on asphalt

and every place is beautiful because

someone remembers something there.

It’s true– I could stop and see for myself.

I prefer the tour though– the zoom in

zoom out of the places where we light candles in the

windows.

I’m making my own postcards–

dropping out an open car window to

watch each square to turn to ash

in the simmer of the tail lights

in front of me.

A petition to the concept of beauty from a girl who cuts herself out each morning from a sheet of sugar cookie dough.

I’m hoping I have more than fifteen years before they embalm me.

I’d like to see Tokyo or be in a place so quiet that I could only

hear my own hinges swinging open.

I’d like to eat Belgian waffles from the diner

next to the airport and everything bagels

with vegetable cream cheese from my blue kitchen counter

next to my mother who knits wash rags

before I’m embalmed.

Until then I want to learn to stop preserving myself.

I can leave that to the mortician’s

tray of tweezers and twisty rods.

I live in a county who duct tapes my eyes open

to the shape it wants me to be. I know I should

have a manicure if I want an office job

but not too bold a color or I’d stand out.

I should eat a salad with raspberry vinaigrette on the side

on my first date. I should buy food

with the word “lean” in it.

I should learn young how to listen to

the radio on an elliptical to drown out

my own ragged breathing.

I should know that mirrors were for enumerating

my imperfection each morning.

Dear concept of beauty– you gave me callous elbows.

You taught me there was nothing worse

than the word “fat”.

Don’t say it like it such a small word.

You can hear “fat” resonate in every pour

of you skin if you’re a woman in America.

Each letter explains how we were never

anything more than the roller skating Barbie

we wrapped up for our daughters birthday party–

as if pouring her into a waffle iron was a present–

a gift. “How lovely to be a woman?”

I don’t want to be a woman– you’ve made that

something I never want to be. Maybe I’m

queer because all I hear in “woman”

is the sulking figure of my anorexic sugar-cookie

finger nails.

I hope I scare you.

I hope you don’t know what my pronouns are.

I know my OCD will

continue to cup me in his palms like loose nickles

but I want to write beauty in how many steps

I took on gravel side roads that day

I’ll count snapped twigs and cardboard

coffee cups instead of sit ups or my

own ribs.

I have never wanted to be a sugar cookie

even though I have always

loved rainbow sprinkles.

I’ll eat them with a spoon.

I want to be banana bread or

three a.m. caramel brownies.

Someday I will eat food like I read books–

without fear of what they will change in me.

I’m not ready to be embalmed yet.

Leave that to the dentist’s chair.

Whatever I am now, tomorrow, and

next Thursday morning is beautiful.

Whatever you are now, tomorrow, and

next Thursday morning at the diner

waiting to order sunny-side up eggs

and a everything bagel

is beautiful.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dinosaur bones and vertebrae of verbs.

 

I don’t think the Allosaurus poised

in the Museum of Natural History

ever wrote poetry–

If he did I think that he would

be offended by how small children

in red canvas shoes only like him

for his teeth and maybe because he’s a

meat eater.

I wonder if it’s even really him

standing there– his bones are stone

memories of steps and crinkles

of a beast soil has forgotten.

Sediments blinked over him–

shut eye lids of sleep.

I think he wrote

radical free verse– not like a beat poet–

He’d write the type of poetry that’s

scattered all over the page in the shape

of an apple or a palm tree.

He wouldn’t take himself too seriously

but he he would move his lips

when he read a poem to himself.

He would wish he could write words

on his bones so that they could be fossilized too.

He wouldn’t want to write a sonnet–

he’d leave that to the Apatosaurus.

I think if tiny people ever piece me together

that I might have written enough–

eaten enough words so that they could all see

them in the stone silhouettes of my bones.

Maybe they’d piece me together wrong

and use my pinkies as horns–

at least they would see that I had written

something other than bones.

Times I’ve pretended to be lost.

1

My mother would walk Billy in the frog stroller

with me in her orbit. I asked her “Can I lead the way home?”

just to take the first wrong turn that I could

in the hopes that the walk could be longer

and that we might end up down a street

that unfurled into a gravel dead end.

Maybe there would be a honey suckle bush

waiting.

2

From a young age I had grown to consider supermarkets

as only a different play ground. Billy and I stole

the sliced cheese and nibbled on the corners

while hiding under racks of clearance bathrobes.

We were spies. We plucked fruit from the jungle–

crunched coffee beans under our feet in the aisles.

I loved it when they summoned my mother

over the intercom and I’d make believe that I had been scared

only to tell my mom as I lay on the bottom rack of the

shopping cart “I wanted to hear them say my name.”

She said, “Don’t do that again.”

3

In the woods by the creek Billy and I passed the brick house

that we convinced ourselves was haunted.

We’d stay the chain swaying from the ceiling

was used to hang someone. It was heavy dusk–

cold enough to puff our breath like dragons.

I said, “I don’t know which way is out

all the trees look the same.”

We rationed our oats and honey nature valley bars

until Billy started to cry.

I got up from the mildew log.

We were home in twenty-minutes.

4

I thought I was eighteen yesterday.

I thought I was twelve. I thought I was nine.

I thought I was seven.

I’m not sure how old I am or if it even matters.

I wanted to walk alone in New York City

and pretend.

I both wanted to walk

like I knew where I was going and get lost

at the same time.

I wanted to end up somewhere I’d never been

but enter the cafe like I was a regular who

the men in canvas aprons behind the counter

somehow neglected to remember.

Maybe I was a poet there– a salsa dancer

a vegan food truck chef taking a day

off to meet a boy she met in line

at the French bakery.

If someone would have asked my name

I imagined I would still would tell them that I was

“Sarah” because to them “Sarah”

could still be the poet or the salsa dancer

or the vegan food truck chef

not even sure if she remembered

the boy’s last name.

I want to get lost more

and find my way back to the home

tangled in my name

and in my notebook.

 

A year scrawls itself behind me

in chalk and in sharpie.

I see myself from the year before

through a terrarium wall.

I put my face to the glass and smudge it.

My eyes blink like a spotted geko–

a horned lizard

under the artificial comfort

of the heat lamp.

I eat the same bagged crickets

crunchy like my dead scales.

She is reptilian.

She is cold skin.

I think of her as the captured

exotic– she dances for me.

I still have the heat lamp.

I still eat the crickets.

I still have cold skin.

Oh everyone is waiting for a midnight

you know?

Even though all

we’ve ever been is a lovely

stack of Matryoshka dolls

painting on a new face

only to stand back and

see that it’s the same

but still

stunning

visage.