You will not wake at 7
tomorrow and get to work
as I’ve read he did,
will not wonder until 9 or 11 a.m.
if you can fly Berthe to San Francisco
to confirm “sorrow everywhere”
[Jack Gilbert] though
she hasn’t read the poet,
that you know of.
You created her in a story,
Berthe is a character,
and if you exit the club
with only that lilac tattoo
on the kissable dip of
your wrist you will work
on her in the morning
like she is a face and you are
plastic surgeon to the stars
instead of a writer of stories
you are not sure anyone reads.
There is a woman.
Her breath is jasmine, no,
hibiscus, no, ancient—
Egyptian myrrh
rubbed on the royal dead
who foresaw death as
beloved of symbolists
who see you in thresholds
and on a journey.
Beneath a silver globe
of disco you were felines
howling. Her dress of velvet mauve.
Oil-of-lavender her skin.
Her baby-breath nipple caressed
by a crushed strap sliding.
Andy Warhol would
slip away to a life of control
and productivity,
two words at a loss on
a dance floor with a remote
of secret flesh, in mirrors.
Etiquette must, if it is to be of more than trifling use,
include ethics as well as manners. —Emily Post
It is easy enough to
thank the cashier
so I do.
I am rather fabulous,
you may have noticed,
well-bred too
not flaunty of assets.
Crass is not a word
you’ll use to describe me
not any time soon
not behind my back nor
in front of it.
So I dip my fat red
strawberry toes
in the sweat of
the cashier’s brow
as if it were sweet
chocolate fondue.
You don’t?
Let’s forgo guilt together.
If you ask me
someone got it wrong or
was mistranslated
by an arriviste scholar
with holes in his socks.
The poor may be
around but they are not
always with us.
They couldn’t afford the rent.
Far be it from me
to say more on the matter
as my place,
like zeroes in an equation,
must be held
like my hand
by someone in the club
humbled as am I
via inescapable tragedies
our ability to weather
heartache and storms
in my brother’s yacht
unless he has sailed
inconveniently for me
to the islands
in which case
his heated gazebo
must do.
We bear up as we are
a noble sort
who’ve inherited
if not the earth
then a knack for stealing
everything upon it.
Sarah Sarai is the author of I Feel Good (Beard of Bees), Emily Dickinson’s Coconut Face (Dusie Kollektiv), and The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX). Her poems are also in journals including Boston Review, POOL, and Pank. Her fiction is in Fairy Tale Review, Storyglossia, South Dakota Review, Weber Studies, The Antigonish Review, The Writing Disorder, and others. Her short story, “The Young Orator,” will be released through the Winged City Chapbooks competition series. She lives in New York with her dreams (which center on California–specifically, L.A.).
ISSUE:
F A L L
2013
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