all by Sarah Sarai 2022 Oct 24

Please Include a Short Bio Statement

My bed is a living soul.

I change the sheets weekly.

When trying to quit

I would smoke a few,

drench the pack, 

tweak out,

dry cigs in the oven,

light up.

The fire that time.

No one showing for my funeral,

especially the twittering phobic,

doesn’t faze me.

Everyone knowing the twittering

phobic don’t show for my funeral

equally fazes me not.

Can I swing retirement in Belize?

Oman’s not working out

as I’d hoped.

Speaking abstractly,

penises can be beautiful.

Breasts are the world.

FAMILY SECTION

   Be Holding Dr. J - 

Be Aunting

I sent my great-nephew

a collection of poems on perfection,

mastery, the work, this whole

being alive thing, being Black

(which I’m not but my nephew is

is and my great-nephew is).

He is in 12th grade. Status schools

have been scouting him for his

brain, big, analytic, mathematical.

The collection is Be Holding.

It is an ode to Dr. J. 

The poet is Ross Gay. 

If you are reading this, Ross Gay,

who I have not met, thank you

for your gift to the all of us.

I hope my great-nephew’s life

is floral and expert and California-

worthy. I want it beautiful

and open, glorious, sure, I’ll take

glorious, in this untrustworthy world.

“split at the root” Adrienne Rich on being half Jewish

Half Christian

Big Little Lambs

My nephew and niece, 

half-White all-Black, 

don’t care about my divided self, 

my split-at-the-rootness,

Christian blah blah Jewish blah blah.

White + white is two whites

spooning in a pudding of white.

With all respect to my folks.

Hey, I know Black is not 

for sure saintly as most saints 

are not for sure saintly.

But for their time on the rack.

Let’s rest this poem on an oven

rack as if it were lamb led

to dinner, a lamb dripping with

blood, connection, and shame.

This poem is heliocentric as 

the ego basking in itself.

Nephew and niece, they grow,

like we’re said to in California,

sprouting leaf after shiny leaf 

happy as neon or sundrops.

Erin thanked me for the fifty!

Come on. Sing Happy Birthday.

No One’s in High School These Days

We graduate with contrastive badges,

weirdo girl, prom girl, high i.q.-girl,

neutral girl in the bleachers one row 

behind puffy coat-wearing skinny 

page-girl girl next to goofy boy 

jabbing her car-coat’s loft, pow, 

pow, right index finger, pow pow,

left index finger, lipping You look 

fat in this coat, pow, and neutral girl 

thinking Shut up and skinny page-

girl girl thinking she’ll skip the coat 

next week, nerdy girl, abused girl,

abused girl, abused girl, pot-dealing 

girl, acid-dropping girl, girl who in 

seventy years will be not-so-bitter

girl, immovable past girl, future girl.

Shock-White

i.

After my mother died from Jesus I left my hair color alone. If it’s just fucking you want, or all you can handle, a decent cut will do.

ii.
We laughed, me and her, when she stopped. It was the same faded blond she’d been covering.

iii.
Once I quit, my hair prospered gray and white and where you rubbed my nape, auburn, like my locks when California sun baked them red. When I was waiting to be something or someone. And still didn’t realize the woman who was my mother read only that bit of her job description on good shoes and teaching four daughters how to assemble do-it-yourself installations of shame.

iv.
In the year of covid-fear all the hairs on my head turned shock-white, all white, only white.

v.
Back when Mom was killing herself in the name of Jesus my next oldest sister jumped shock-white. She did that over and over pleading thing, too. Stop, stop, stop. No changing Mom, is what I knew.

vi.
Though one time I floated my theory on the limitations of Jesus, who I like outside of church. Mom kept dying.

vii.
Volition and a misreading of human possibility. Are the careless and evil winning?

How Brilliant Beethoven

If my father believed he needed to arm himself against the insanely damaged carrying rapid-fire to end everyday schoolkids with still-squishy bodies perfecting daffy walks, or teens with their dreams of endless horizons after high school, some part of them knowing life doesn’t give up on its challenge but that youth is a superpower. Well, if my father owned a gun he’d have fumbled opening the safe, shouted at my mom and sisters to be careful as he lifted a lockbox from the safe, trembled working the lockbox and shaken on realizing nothing left to open but a box of bullets and opening that would call the question. He’d have howled there was no locked box in the lockbox in the safe, not that we ever owned a safe or lockbox to lock in it, insisted we were moving back to New York. My mother, who was Christian, would have taken gun and bullets from his twitching hand to load the pistol. She gave birth four times and also could drown mice in the toilet or a pail of water. She would not have shot anyone, would have denied the weapon existed then read Bible and attendant texts while my father, calmed by a shot of whisky, demanded to know if I had read Robert Louis Stevenson yet and if me and my three sisters, each far older than I will ever be, had a clue how brilliant Beethoven was.

great Weather for Media:

The “Was That Your Sister’s Vagina?” Monologue

I’m not judging,

but there’s a vagina on

your sister’s profile.

Likely not your sister’s

vagina but it is a vagina,

winking at whoever 

drifts by, signaling

rest in a storm or

no rest for the stormy.

Maybe statement art

mixed message-y 

yet a necessary reminder:

A vagina is not an

insta-salve for loneliness.

Estranged are the many

from their heartbeat.

Please tell your sister 

about the vagina on 

her profile. Remind her 

to check her settings,

and also that Auntie 

would love to hear 

from her. She didn’t

answer my last email.

This Way and That

     It was a fairy funeral. [William Blake]

On the garden bed of

Blake’s fairy procession

roll this and that, these ways

of midnight pleasure

in enchantment and

commonplace wisdom

like don’t touch the fairies,

they’re sensitive.

Act within a soul

populated by

sightings and wistful affection,

see the filmstrip is at

high-enough speed

life’s fluidity’s felt,

as at the funeral Blake saw,

a bodylet laid out on a leaf.

Authentication enough for me

[that fairies exist] I e-mailed you

who reminded me

Blake saw God when he was

four. God got down on Her

omni-aching knees

now and then to spy on

William Blake

and could hardly contain Her

infinite self, waiting for

the artist to become Heaven and

those paintings to be flashed to

the good and bad alike as proof of

the great mystery of vision

even She can’t figure out.