Poetry | March 01, 2010
Poetry Feature: Sarah Blackman
Sarah Blackman
Featuring the poems:
-
Baucis and Philemon
-
The Event Horizon
-
Melancholia; a Fantasy
-
A Marriage Poem (featured as Poem of the Week, May 4, 2010)
-
The Distance Between the House and the Barn
A Marriage Poem
I am unmarried and do not know
how life is simplified by cruelties.
—Beckian Fritz Goldberg
It is the year
I have bartered away all my teeth.
My mouth is a lush place,
full of black usury and in return
I have a pair of new shoes,
a wheel of soft sheep’s cheese,
five of the world’s ten hottest peppers.
Where will I go, my mouth
so many wounds, that they
won’t know me by my absent bite?
How will I succor you, or the cat
we kept, or the one whose fleas
I am popping flat on my thumbnail
even as I reject her winsomeness?
Still, I don’t regret.
I am not a wife,
but maybe a window. Look
through me is the house,
is the water boiling,
a pepper slipped beneath the skin of the pie.
Look through me is the carefully arranged plate,
an eye for beauty, a terrible smile
all the worse because I mean it
so sincerely, am so happy
in these beaten hours
tapping back and forth across the boards.
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