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| You're gonna need a bigger boat. |
Family
My three siblings are older than I am.
The biggest Russian doll who
contains we younger is Jean,
and it is with her I saw the movie Jaws.
For The Exorcist I just went along with
a loose assemblage, friends of friends.
That’s what you do with movies,
you see them, even if it’s the first
day and you are blithe as a donut on
an oblong tray at Winchell’s.
If the Vatican set up a table in
the theater lobby like Seventh Day
Adventists in the subways I’d have
signed up for a catechism class on
the spot. That was some scary shit.
One time Jean sent me a clipping from
the San Francisco Examiner.
Two sisters, 76 and 82ish, lived together
on Nob Hill until the older murdered
the younger. Watch your back, kid,
Jean printed in the margin.
I knew Jaws was going to be epic,
am unsurprised by this future of
plastic predators-of-the-seas rising from
bubble baths on Saturday Night Live.
But when the shark leapt from an
endless ocean of lost whalers, Jean
and me, we screamed, we shrieked,
we grabbed each other’s hands.
Before and after Jaws I have known terror.
That was the only time I ever held my sister’s hand.
___
Sarah Sarai. Published in Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books), 2016.
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