Sunday, December 18, 2016

Twitter: Join the Fun. Our Precedent-elect Is There. Follow Me!

Hey! I haven't seen y'all on Twitter, lately! Follow me! I am the way. I am the fork in the road. I am the spoonable woman women want to spoon. All that and, more or less, more!

So, every so often I remember I am on Twitter. I go on the hunt,  rack up new friends and new enemies with my political mini-opines. Or quick, ill-advised judgments. Or fun links. Cats! Anyone like cats? Join the fun! Follow me. 

My hair is not unpleasantly poufy or frightening young children with asymmetry; my skin is not orange; I did not blow an INHERITED million-dollar real estate empire in New York City. You gotta admit. THAT took some special skill, Mr. Precedent-elect.
Click!
or
copy 'n paste:
https://twitter.com/SarahSarai

See you soon.

Saturday, December 10, 2016

"I've been ridden hard and put away wet." from a July Westhale #poem in Thin Noon



You Can Lead a Horse to Water. Repeat.


                           "I want to say, you're good girls,
                             wanting to leave your names behind like that."
                                            -Louise Glück

I'm a working girl, I'm a girlfriend experience.
I dance incurably damned on stage. I'll tell
you I love you more than the moon, you hang
the moon, I'll shoot the moon.
I'll say I adore you to the moon,
and back, the moon is your fault, I'm moony
over you. I'll say, point me to the moon,
and fly me to it. I'm over the moon.
The truth is I mist my panties with a spray bottle.
I rarely see the sky at night.

I've been ridden hard, and put away wet.
That thing about horses is false.
You can give them salt, and they will take it
willingly. They can't forsake salt.
They lick it until they blister, and then
they wear it proud, but secret, inside
their mouths.
______
By July Westhale. Published in Thin Noon, an online journal from Brown University. 

"Four Interlaced Horses" from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Persian. Safavid Period, early 17th century.


Wednesday, December 7, 2016

A beautiful review of my book, Geographies...


Many, many thanks to writer July Westhale for this startlingly intelligent review of my chap/book Geographies of Soul and Taffeta. The review is in Lambda Literary

Her [Sarai's] poems acknowledge the human capacity for boundary—and our inability to come to terms with fallibility. And while the poems speak to intimacies, to a constellation of personal intimacies that do the world a service in being global, they also speak to a state of people in crisis. Of people steering into the sun, unsure how they even got in the car in the first place, and where they’ll go next.
Thanks to Posit and Susan Lewis (wherein "It Is True and Truth Sometimes Gets Me Published" - quoted above - was published; to Indolent Books and Michael Broder; and to William Johnson for marshalling/editing Lambda Literary. July Westhale is a writer to watch.

Saturday, December 3, 2016

...inferno of passions... Jung


A man who has not passed through the inferno of his passions has never overcome them. As far as we can discern, the sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves.  
 C.G. Jung

illustration from The Red Book

Sunday, November 20, 2016

Writing in Response to the Times Because the Times Are Demanding

From Askatechteacher.com

It's good that literary outlets are soliciting responses from writers and artists, responses to the strange world we are now in. It is safe to assume that The New Yorker and The Guardian, among others of the more elite venues, are paying their contributors for quickly penning essays and poems about the post-election prospects for a safe world.

Four nonprofit journals have asked for my contribution, and yes, I'm flattered, but also not unaware that my writing will be without financial recompense, I am being asked to add nuance to the nightmare for free.  Of course everything I write I write for free. This model is wrong. But so it a Trump presidency, wrong and a nightmare, Trump in the White House, and even worse, Trump in Trump Tower, making traffic in New York City come to a stop.

Yesterday I wrote my first draft of a prose poem and I will begin work on the other three responses. Partly because being encouraged to think quick and write quick is good practice. Many many artists do so while I mull, believing, me being the believinger, it takes time for the dust to settle and ideas to shape into full-on essays. But it (it?) shouldn't have to and in my case, it won't.

I began writing this blog posting with some resentment, but have written my way out of my resentment, aha!, a model, a lesson, that I can write my way out of resentment and into prose and poetry that will assist myself and others to process what befell and what is to befall us. And not just process, but resist, impact, help rework into policies less ugly than our ugliest nightmares. But if processing the nightmare is all I accomplish, that will be enough. I know I need help making sense of the spectacle of undemocracy.

Thursday, October 27, 2016

A Rhetorical Inquiry Into The Moral Certitude Of Cause And Effect [#poem] [#ElevenEleven]


A Rhetorical Inquiry Into The Moral Certitude Of Cause And Effect

Today we picked tulips and

 

stubbed our big toe and went

 

to war and lost a bunch a arms

 

and feet and shit and gunned

 

down a dozen fifty people

 

and got tired and took a nap

 

and had a family and raised

 

a mess a kids and picked

 

daffodils and scratched our

 

finger bad and then we went

 

to war. We blew up some big

 

stuff and little stuff and people

 

tall and stupid crying babies

and a whole lot a us puked

and we were buried or they

put us on these lame cots and

we got better and met girls

 

and boys and had families and

 

glued pink fuzzy bunny ears

 

on our sister’s headband for

 

spring assembly and then we

 

killed a whole lot more people

 

cause we had to go to war cause

 

we picked lilies and sneezed and

 

after you pick lilies and sneeze

 

or something they send you to

 

war. Don’t you know anything?

 


by Sarah Sarai. First published in Eleven Eleven, Issue 5.
Anti-war. Not anti-soldier.