Of Course It Was Obama - by Sarah Sarai

July 1, 2026, Indolent Books, Second Coming Poem-A-Day Series

Their Every Yellow Leaf #poem #NewOhioReview

Aspen leaves still green but ever fluttery.

https://budburst.org/plants/38

Their Every Yellow Leaf

 

Jacinth looks at the pig and 

asks what she did in another lifetime

to be so beautiful. 

Maybe not everyone would see it

but she’s perfect.

I am not everyone. I agree. 

Alice is perfect, 

a hippopotamus made compact. 

I stroke her dark hide and feed her 

fruit cup from breakfast. 

Cauliflower and a toasted bagel. 

Plum jam. 

With the pig, Jacinth 

and I break bread. 

Jacob, who is new to this poem,

buries his cigarette in a late Fall lawn 

to take a call from Quebec. 

In bright sunlight Alice considers

eternally recycling life. Is my guess. 

Jacinth has no interest in me or Jacob 

and praises only the pig, who is complete. 

Is her guess. The heart gets lonely 

some days. Is Jacob’s guess. 

Feeding Alice renders longing and irritation 

irrelevant, without obliterating either. 

Aspens snap their every yellow leaf. 

The trees expected we’d be gone by now. 

Their every yellow leaves don’t guess. 

 

Thank you to the editors of New Ohio Review, 2023 for selecting this poem.

Renegade Sonnets Once Removed

"September" by Gerhard Richter
Museum of Modern Art, N.Y.C.

Renegade Sonnets Rendered via Ekphrasis

A few notes on Rob Stanton’s Once Removed (Nono Press/2022)

 

by Sarah Sarai

 
We look to the past to understand the past. Also repetitive disorders and daily stupidities. We look to the past to understand a shared present, greed and hauteur acted out, to divine a future we pretend we can’t foresee. Or we try to persuade our leaders in a pursuit of common sense, kindness, equality. One much-studied and globally shared event of the past, the attack on the Twin Towers, is interrogated by Rob Stanton in his ekphrastic chapbook Once Removed. 
 
The object of Stanton’s contemplation is, of course, not the attack but the remarkable painting September by Gerhard Richter, whose work often magnetizes viewers. I’ve watched museum patrons squint and study his canvases in a manner that feels unique from interrogations of other artwork. Strictly anecdotal, on my part. 
 
Nudged by an anniversary of the attack on the Twin Towers and through a study of Richter’s 2005 painting, Stanton created these stencil sonnets. My term. They are a cry from a heftier sonnet of classical literary history and the many contemporary iterations. They are stripped. As in September. Neither better nor worse than earlier iterations of a loved form of poetry, each wee sonnet is comprised of four stanzas: two brief, each four lines, all short; then two stanzas, three lines each. Each a puff of word or each word is a puff of smoke. Appropriate by design as September depicts the Towers after the second building was hit. Matching what we witnessed on that day, in Richter’s work the structures are discernable only through menace of dust and aggregation. From Rob Stanton’s Sonnet 154:
 
A corona of suddenly
insignificant 
 
                        litter spills
                        Blow back.
                        blow back 
 
On the twentieth anniversary of the attack I broke down and watched the documentaries. That’s what there was, “litter spill.” For the record, Richter was flying to New York in a commercial plane that had to be diverted to Halifax. But that fact makes him no more privy to this wound that will not heal than anyone else. 
 
From “160.” “...already / pockets of flouted sky / cerulean blue / are being tendered.” 
 
Once Removed is a Nono Press venture, as is Sonnets 1-159, in a longer work “dedicated to the work of Luc Tuymans.” 
 
 
 
A native of the UK, Rob Stanton teaches in Austin, Texas. He is the author of The Method (Penned in the Margins, 2011) and Trip- (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2013). Contact him for more information.
 
 
 
 
 
 

Blackbird v Blackbird: Stevens v Sarai: Two Poems

"The End of November: The Birds That Didn't Learn How to Fly" by Thornton Dial, 2007. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, N.Y.

I am close to embarrassed, but what would be the point. I already know that I am not Wallace Stevens, and he is not Sarah Sarai. That being established may I say I had Stevens’ poem in mind as I wrote “Another Way of Looking.” I was responding to Stevens. Saying, Click a prism and you will see different perspectives with each time. But now that I see my poem adjacent to the great Wallace Stevens’ poem, “Thirteen Ways...” Well. Yikes and all that. Sigh. I plow on. First my poem. Then his. Thanks to the editor of Prelude, Stu Watson.

Another Way of Looking
by Sarah Sarai

The poem on the page
remains on the page

the page with the poem is
the page with the poem it

may lift it self (up)

or snack and nap

but there it is on the page

in all its theory

in all its wisdom which

is not all wisdom

hey, a blackbird knows wisdom

just one blackbird

no need to cast shade over

the whole of them

from Prelude Journal, Stu Watson, ed.

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird
by Wallace Stevens

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,   
The only moving thing   
Was the eye of the blackbird.   

II
I was of three minds,   
Like a tree   
In which there are three blackbirds.   

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.   
It was a small part of the pantomime.   

IV
A man and a woman   
Are one.   
A man and a woman and a blackbird   
Are one.   

V
I do not know which to prefer,   
The beauty of inflections   
Or the beauty of innuendoes,   
The blackbird whistling   
Or just after.   

VI
Icicles filled the long window   
With barbaric glass.   
The shadow of the blackbird   
Crossed it, to and fro.   
The mood   
Traced in the shadow   
An indecipherable cause.   

VII
O thin men of Haddam,   
Why do you imagine golden birds?   
Do you not see how the blackbird   
Walks around the feet   
Of the women about you?  

VIII
I know noble accents   
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;   
But I know, too,   
That the blackbird is involved   
In what I know.   

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,   
It marked the edge   
Of one of many circles.   

X
At the sight of blackbirds   
Flying in a green light,   
Even the bawds of euphony   
Would cry out sharply.   

XI
He rode over Connecticut   
In a glass coach.   
Once, a fear pierced him,   
In that he mistook   
The shadow of his equipage   
For blackbirds.   

XII
The river is moving.   
The blackbird must be flying.   

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.   
It was snowing   
And it was going to snow.   
The blackbird sat   
In the cedar-limbs.

from the Poetry Foundation website.

Words and their heftier cousins...invited to the writing party

 

You tell me.

Reviving drafts of unfinished short stories which is proving to be enormously rewarding. And by rewarding I mean I'm diggin' the words. The current drafts are just that - fiction that's unfinished or finished but not polished. Stores not new to the party, such as the writing party is. Well, obviously the cellar's been dug and the foundation laid so there's that. Yeah. Stop. Okay.

I haven't sent one of the previously unpublished (and now reworked) stories out yet, mainly because there are few and when the few are gone ... girl, they'll be gone. They'll be gone, girl.

We're talking two or three new stories one of which is novella-like. It's like a novella because it is one.

Some days I am up against depression. It throws me to the ground and holds me down with vicious glee. The counteractive to depression is joy.

Repeat: The counteractive is joy. Words and their heftier cousins, sentences, are joy. New and reworked and working on reworking. Joy. Sarah Sarai 8/4/22

a hefty cousin

Ahab's tale never gets old. Changes by way of perspective.

 

Ahab's white whale, courtesy of the NYTimes.

The Avoirdupois Chic

More than once did he put forth the faint blossom of a look, which, in any other man, would have soon flowered out in a smile. – Melville

My depraved indifference to death
sets Ahab to thumping his peg
against my leg so we’ll perchance into
that which precedes an heir bearing
his bi-syllabic surname on banners bright
through the belly of the whale warm as
mutton and potatoes tea towel-topped.
If you can’t bear a son, at least a splinter
Mr. Ahab says, for use against blubbery
blowhard though how, you might puzzle.
No intimate to his intricacies am I
who harbor soft-spots for heavyweights
fat as concubines, the avoirdupois chic.
Given the length of a life in nautical miles
there’s hardly time for history to congeal
for the slain to raise kin underskin the
abandoned to banshee dreams as locust
swoop hover and hum desert-side
Ahab Uno’s tent on palmy summer eves.
Ecstasy is all it’s cracked up to be,
insufficient, a means to a cul-de-sac.
Are locust merely in love with love?
Starting soon, let’s no longer be afraid.
The locust are at the door, dear. 
Well, set a plate for the happy couples! 
Tomorrow Ahab goes with his gut,
with its celiac flora.  Sing a seafaring
song of fish fingers, ladies, avast! ahoy!
Childhood fosters the eternal orphan.
God wants what God wants.
You, my dear Ahab, merely want,
though That Can Change, a sea battle
dispatch, a motto conceived of
circumstance and truth, life’s sequels,
now ebooks or available for download
at a workstation near me.  Near you.

by Sarah Sarai. first published in Berfrois in 2011.

Berfrois (https://www.berfrois.com) remains a remarkable amalgam of idea, narrative, poetry, perspective, philosophy, natural history, science, art, architecture, you-name-it-ism. 

Keeping Me Warm: short story; fat; serial killer, jail, parents, reservation, western Washington

Keeping Me Warm

 

At first I thought he was a serial killer, but reversed my decision and settled on registered sex offender. In the dark of the movie theater I also concluded the man to my left was born old. Old is among the more subjective of terms, but you know what I mean and, besides. I teach English and literature, and am fat and a dyke. I know about subjective. Or something.

            Drifting above grease slicks of chemical popcorn his sweat smelled like it had been frozen and was thawing. He wore an oily windbreaker reeking of unrepentance and sorrow, and spent long minutes peeling layers of Saran Wrap from snacks he’d smuggled in, peeling it off, biting slices of something I hoped was cheese. He kept knocking his right elbow into the human tissue-stuffed cloud of my midriff, into flannel shirt, sweatshirt and the loft of my parka. 

             I might have told you this before, but I have a history. My parents were drug dealers in the Bay Area. They were caught, imprisoned and through a contrivance of fate and a variable deity’s unending knack for amusement, died two years in, my mother in a fire in the kitchen of the Northern California Women’s Facility; my father in a classic shanking by a jailed member of Nuestra Familia. The murderer needed recognition although how much he received for fatally slicing my conniving though generally dazed and kind father, well, I have to wonder.

            Now I live in the great Pacific Northwest, in the city of Seattle where I teach in a private high school. For the record, I didn’t leave California because of my parents. I left because of a woman, a fat woman, like me. I am a fat woman who loves fat women.

            Merlye was not a fat woman but it was she who was seated on my non-serial killer side in the theater. I exuded hostility when the serial killer, registered sex offender or whatever he was kept intruding on my space. Fortunately, Merlye was alert as he positioned his elbow for another gratuitous jab. Around the time the movie star in the Utah desert was deliriously hosting an imaginary morning talk show, she whispered we should switch seats. Mr. Grandma Smell proved disinterested in Merlye, who is thin and not vulnerable, at least not openly like I am. The movie ended without incident, unless you want to count the character played by the movie star sawing off his arm.

            It was kind of unusual that Merlye and I were at the theater or even doing something together at all, but there we were. On Thursday after school, she had asked if I wanted to drive her to the reservation the next day. We’d been getting to know each other. I’d asked for Native American fiction suggestions for my class. Two afternoons a week she taught history of Native art to a select crew of our students. She’d appreciated my interest and, I suspect, understood, just looking at my very large, pale and serious face, I was, as they say, a breed apart, certainly apart from our principal and board. Of course everyone wants to be a breed apart,, wants their breakdancing inner-city child to manifest so the world knows how cool they really are. Lots of people just might be cool. You don’t know.

            Merlye’s car was in the shop, and the loaner wasn’t reliable enough for a round-trip into the countryside. She is a little skittish, but not skinny-woman skittish which is like kitten-on-crack skittish. More like smoker-skittish. She is in her early forties, with a son out of rehab, living at his girlfriend’s apartment and selling his canvases to galleries. Her husband is living or dead, I have yet to figure that one out, though they weren’t talking, which would be more relevant if he were alive. 

            So when she asked if I wanted to see to the reservation—she said, “If my car is still busted.”—I responded, “Yeah, sure.” I am a sucker for being included in pretty much anything and as a northern Californian, adore field trips. My parents thrilled to high deserts such as the area around Mount Shasta, and one time we drove the Oregon Coast highway, curvy, dramatic, moody. I would be happy if I were asked to be driver for a bank robbery, something my father suggested but my mother talked him out of. I think he was kidding.

            “See the reservation? Yeah, I’d like that.” 

            Her job was a curator at United Indians of All Tribes Daybreak Star Cultural Center’s art gallery in Seattle’s Discovery Park, in the Magnolia neighborhood, where I picked her up Friday afternoon, a little later than we’d agreed, but then she hadn’t finished whatever she was working on. We had to stop by her apartment for bags of groceries and whatever else. About the time we packed the car a storm broke, half a day before Channel 5 predicted it would.

            The ground was getting muddy and muddier, the downpour was violent compared to the generally misty sort of rain we know here. Backpacks and bags were safe in the back seat, but our outer gear, a term I’d learned since leaving the Bay Area, was challenged to withstand the wet. Even before I shifted into first it was clear the windshield wipers were organizing a protest against water and gravity. They screeched like rubber banshees. 

            “Hey,” Merlye said. “Wanna see a movie?” She suggested things might clear up in spite of weather forecasts. Caesar’s death may have been accurately predicted (or not—maybe there were monthly warnings, Beware the Ides of April, Beware the Ides of May, Beware the Ides of December, oh, and March, too) but overall, auguries even of a scientific nature are a guess. If we could see into the future we would be able to see into the future. Right?

            So there we were, next to a child molester-type and wondering what it would feel like to saw off your own arm.  

            It was after nine when we left the cineplex. 

            She climbed into the passenger seat, and soon as I put my key in, messed with the radio which, like the Bible, can be used to tell you whatever you want to believe. We were told the worst of the storm had moved east and she asked if I wouldn’t want to head for the reservation now. “Sounds like the roads are safe.”

            “You sure?” I was having trouble seeing her expression. Her hood had a drawstring. It was pulled tight. She reminded me she had been making the drive forever and offered to take the wheel. She could navigate, I told her.

            Before getting on the highway we stopped for cigarettes but once inside the convenience store decided not to buy any and left carrying hot coffees and Twizzlers. However, sort of like the Bible or a radio station, you can find what you want in a many a purse. Merlye found half a pack of generic cigarettes in hers. As she lit up, she said, “They’re cheaper home,” and handed over a lit smoke. She snarled that Big Tobacco was attempting to do what the treaty breakers of the U.S. government failed at—”Killing us off.”

            Some events, car trips among them, call for tobacco—in other words, some events demand a sacrifice. Life isn’t a Shirley Jackson story, as I tell my students, but there’s a reason everyone reads “The Lottery” and it isn’t just that educators who write curriculum are lazy (they might be but that’s another story). It’s because the village wants its scapegoat. Gotta train the young ones.

            It was a dark drive under the black wool night of the great Pacific Northwest, brooding, a change from San Francisco’s dark and smoky civilized terror. Civilization is a scary sucker trying to run interference on the existence of evil.

            We arrived well after midnight. Her sister Gail was up watching a talk show and doing some kind of needlework. She was kind to me, rubbing my shoulder, maybe because we shared something. Like me, she was big. 

            They laid out some quilts and settled me on the couch. The next morning I woke up when a four-year old ran a red metal car on my legs. Hot wheels. He had big black eyes in a big round face and unleashed, big joy. Gail called out from the kitchen there was coffee; Merlye told me to hang out because they were going to get the place ready. I didn’t know what they meant, but they took Harold with them, leaving me with eggs and a loaf of bread, margarine, a toaster, one side of which worked. I pulled on my sneakers to walk outside with my buttered toast. I chewed and studied small houses and some trailers set up on wheels. The trees, oh the tress, were tall and so present, thriving among people’s lives, their needles making patterns on the ground like a child’s craft or a landed kaleidoscope. A crow in Goth black flew here and there, narrating events with authoritative caws. I had been thinking of sitting outside but everything was wet from the storm, of course, so I wandered back, buttered another slice of toast, and felt the quiet.

            Then Gail and Merlye returned, and Harold, who was crying because his hot wheels were missing one wheel. I found another car under a cushion on the couch. He imbued me with magic powers until I winced because he’d run a car over a bandaid on my ankle. My yelp made him sad so we spent some time with reparations, another car on my other leg, the couch’s armrest, the rug. Gail made lunch. Around three, Merlye asked if I was ready. I was thinking maybe she meant for a ceremony or sweat lodge, but she meant to drive back to Seattle, directly from the event, whatever it was. We’d never established an itinerary and after the movie and wet drive, a night on the couch, I was satisfied with stopping off at the playground where Harold ran ahead of Gail. Things had dried up enough he had fun on the slide. Gail asked if I wanted to stay another night. Merlye gave no clue as to whether or not she did. I said we should go to the event they’d chattered about, and leave from there.

            It was a birthday party for her cousin Mack who was turning nine. He got T-shirts with logos of a local team and the Seahawks, plus those electronic things kids get now, Gameboys or similar. Her uncle Phil asked me what I thought about Columbus Day, though I could tell he anticipated my response of rage and irony. He complimented me by saying I thought like an Indian. I don’t know that I do, what that means or that Phil really believed his compliment but we got along. He said all the religions worth a damn were pro-kindness and that you never knew who you might need if you fell into a crevice in the Utah desert. He knew which movie Merlye and I’d seen, and asked what I thought of it, but before I could answer, observed anyone could get into trouble in the wilderness, even a native.

            “But one of our team, we would’ve changed shape and flied out of that canyon.”

            Was I included in his team? I was pretty sure he was gay so I might have been. Following up on the movie he commented on the things people have to do under duress. “When I was a young man in love, I was out of control when my person said no. I don’t even want to tell you things I did.” I’m used to hearing confessions from people, and was grateful this one wasn’t specific, though it brought to mind last night’s serial killer/child molester.  

            Gail and some others started putting away paper plates and gathering soda cans. I loaded a few big plastic bags into the trunk, which Merlye unloaded back at her apartment. Blankets for the gift shop at Daybreak Star. 

            “Thanks,” I said, and she said the same. It was a comfortable exchange, a comfortable night and day, and I counted myself lucky as I have known field trips to turn sour. When I got home I returned a phone call from my friend Eudie, short for Eudora, though I always teased her it was a Swedish way of saying Judy. We filled each other in on recent events; she thought Merlye had used me, but I didn’t agree. I got out of town, which is always good, and was served lunch and breakfast—and cake, plus saw beautiful trees, which alone compensate for many of life’s trials. 

            I upended my backpack, threw some stuff into the hamper and some other stuff I neatly folded and returned to the dresser. I can be pretty organized at times, which is the way to be if you are a high school teacher with papers to grade. But I wasn’t ready to do any work, yet. Eudie had invited me over. We left it open. In the meantime I figured I’d walk to the market a block away, on 45^th, for a few staples.

            There is a sturdy tree, a willow, whose leafy branches tremble at my living room window. My apartment is the second floor of a house. I have a private entrance, up a wooden stairway in back. The stairs were once painted green, though it was hard to tell anymore. They blended in. Anyway, I walked down the back stairway, my stairs, and over to my willow, to ground me. It’s a touchstone. 

            And there was the serial killer or registered sex offender, standing under my willow’s weeping foliage. I saw a neighbor across the street picking up stray branches from his yard, probably from the storm, and waved, although I had never talked to him. It was a way of indicating, Hey, Registered Sex Offender, I see you and so does my entire neighborhood. The neighbor fastened a lid on one of his plastic receptacles and went inside his house. I started to walk away because ignoring something or someone is a decent enough way of handling a scary situation, but the wrinkled man—I could see his face was a map of something like grief—called out to me.

            “How are you?” he asked.

            I can’t even begin to tell you how eerie that felt, to be asked by the old man in an oily windbreaker how I was doing. It was zone-of-twilight-like that he’d somehow tracked me down, maybe followed Merlye and me to my car on Friday night, copied my plates and traced them, or saw my parking sticker from school and conducted a little online research. 

            My next thought was to be direct with him, to say, “Not interested” or “I’m a dyke” but I couldn’t make myself engage in any way. He spoke again.

            “Don’t be scared,” he said. 

            I flashed on his Saran Wrapped-snacks, unfolding. 

            “Or worried.” He took a step toward me. A squirrel raced up the willow to the branches behind him—and another scampered in pursuit. Their tails quivered fur and whim. “I followed you to the theater.” That was an explanation?

            “How long have you—”

            He held out his arm for me to stop talking.

            “Your father,” he said. And, “I just got out last month.”

            From the penitentiary. If no one was monitoring him, if he was free to travel to Seattle from the Bay Area, he wasn’t a registered sex offender. I tried to feel good about that though I worried a serial killer could be released on a legal technicality.  

            “I meant, retired.” He expression was crushed by yet another mistake. “I didn’t get out like a prisoner does. I was a correctional officer. I tried to save your father, but there was so much blood, I mean a lot of blood, whew, and I’ve seen my share of blood. I got it all over my arms and the front of my uniform, my union saw to it I didn’t have to pay for a new uniform. Well, I didn't have to pay full price.” 

            I didn’t flinch but if I had, it wouldn’t have mattered. He was not sensitive to my kind of body language, the movements of a large, mistrustful, soft woman. He was sensitive, if you even want to call it that, to quick moves and rage, to revenge and agony in their various manifestations, clearly stated and acted out.

            “Working there was like being in lock up, except I left every night, but I brought it home with me. I bring it everywhere. I brought it to Seattle. Hello, Seattle.” His arms hung limply. His windbreaker was the kind with a flannel lining so old it was turning to dust. “The ugliness of the human race greets you.”

            I asked if he had something to tell me about my father, but all he could say was my father wasn’t a bad man. “He was one of the better ones. I think he might of felt bad about your mom.”

            My father might have felt bad about my mother’s death in California’s most dire women’s penitentiary? I should hope so and about the daughter they left behind. I would hope my father felt bad about a lot of things. He just might have.

            “Is that all,” I asked. I’d forgotten to grab my woolen cap, and sensed an evacuation of my body’s heat. It was ascending. 

            Apparently, that was all. He dragged himself over to his Honda, which was new and really dirty. It might have been me romanticizing, the literary me, trained by Dickens and Victor Hugo to see past the circumstantial evidence, and me molded by the largeness of my soul to see beyond life’s ephemera, but I felt comfortable he didn’t want to hang around and wasn’t going to be a bother. He said he liked sunshine and had settled in Shasta of all locales, a chaparral of shrubs and trees and fragrant earth, not the stark monastic Utah backdrop for a sawed-off arm. His wasn’t a pilgrimage of many stops. My father was the only man who had died bloody in his arms, and now he’d fulfilled some mission.

            I went inside and called Eudie, but she was out, so I dialed Merlye. “Man, did something weird just happen here.” 

            And I told her. 

            “I didn’t feel anything when I sat next to him,” she said. “I thought he was just another creep who likes a certain kind of women. Some weirdos like natives and some like black women and fat women and, you know.”

            “Well I hope he meets up with a nice half-Black, half-native fat woman.” We didn’t laugh and I didn’t see him again. When I told Eudie, I said he was like a ghost in uniform, and later, when I phoned my ex in San Francisco, I embellished and said he had the feel of being  a prophet looking for a few decent people so God didn’t blow the whole thing up. 

            My ex decided this was a good thing.  

           “The whole thing isn’t blown up, we’re all here.  Maybe he bargained God down to finding one person—one decent person—so God would spare the planet.”  

            My conclusion wasn’t that I was the one decent person around but that I was, in fact, a decent person.  That understanding made me glow, as if a shaft of light was shining on me through branches or a window, keeping me warm. 

 

 

published in Connotation Press, Fall, 2013

 

A Dog Barks ... (fiction) (family) (Crenshaw District) (seventies)

A Dog Barks

            So, “hi.” I am watching some game with my brother-in-law and my sister has got off the phone.

            So my sister says, “hi.” She doesn’t sit down. Here’s the scene: me, Lisa, Teddy and the TV. Lisa and Teddy have some furniture, a new couch, old chairs.

            I know Lisa won’t sit down to watch TV because I’ve known her all my life and I never see her except that she’s doing something at a table. She gives crystal parties where you buy punch sets and goblets. She does paper work all the time.

            So we’re in the dining room next to the living room where Teddy is and his brother Keebro pushes the screen door and comes in, says hi to everyone and sits down. The colors: brothers-black; sisters-white. Keebro checks the score.

            Teddy pulls out the cigar box from under his big chair. He rolls one. To be sociable I walk in the living room and take a hit or two.

            “You think you can handle it?” Keebro asks me.

            “I’d rather handle it than you,” I say to say something. They laugh.

            I stroll back to Lisa who is adding things up on her machine, a portable with a miniature, maybe half-inch tape. She brings it to parties.

            “How’s business?”

            Her fingers are moving. To talk she stops. She never smokes.

            “I’m busy. Margie had a party last night and Ellen is giving one Sunday afternoon. It’s building. Look.” She points to the evidence: orders, receipts, invoice slips, piled high. “But we almost didn’t make the house payment.”

            Living room and dining room are divided by molding, up, over and down. We figured there used to be sliding wooden doors. Who needs another wall? I look through the space at Teddy and Keebro, talking about their jobs, the game, news, dope; talking crazy.

            “Why not?” Because I’m not married I expect people with more things – there’s a lot of them – to get it in on time. And Teddy’s a welder. They have some bucks.

            “I don’t know.”

            Our parents would be mad.

            “My landlord’s dog is driving me crazy,” I state loudly enough for both rooms to hear. “He barks. And he’s small and ugly. Black.”

            “Who’s black and ugly,” Teddy shouts from the next room.

            My sister tells him.

            Keebro laughs. “Well, I guess she should know.”

            “No, but listen.” I’ve got this nice persistent buzz and it makes me want to make myself clear. “He barks all the time. I have earplugs but why should I have to bother? And when I walk up the driveway to my car he runs around me in circles, barking.”

            “Kick him,” Teddy and Keebro say.

            “I do.” I want to, anyway.

            The phone rings. It’s Margie for my sister. They are talking and it will be a while. They talk crystal and then I can tell they are on to Margie’s husband Sam. I hang out at the table. I pick up the catalog and read it with the same interest I approach food labels, which I love to read. They use my mind but don’t push me.

            My sister is pouring soda in the kitchen while she talks.  The phone will follow her anywhere.

            “Don’t you think I have a right to quiet?” I look at Teddy and Keebro. They are fixed on the set; their bodies make loose curves in their chairs. My brother-in-law has to break concentration to talk to me.

            “Hey, it’s his property. That’s kind of it.”

            “Why don’t you move here?” Keebro asks, not moving his eyes from the tube.

            “She’s afraid of me.” Teddy reaches for his beer.

            I stand, lean on the molding. No one speaks. Now Keebro is rolling. They’re advertising beer, and he asks, “What kind of dog?”

            “Just small. Skinny.”

            “I thought you said black.”

            “If he’s black he ain’t small,” Teddy says.

            “You wish.” My sister is back.

            The game is on again and I sit down. “How’s Margie?”

            “I don’t know how she does it.” My sister is talking real low. I lean in her direction. “She’s seeing someone.”

            “Does Sam know?”

            “She doesn’t really care. He’s seeing someone. They’re always running out on each other. I wish I could.”

            She runs the machine. I stand by the table. She has these pictures of English landscapes on the walls at which I stare hard.

            “It’s pretty green there, isn’t it,” I comment.

            Teddy walks by. “Tell this dreamer she can move in with us. We got the room.” He puts his hand on the adding machine so it’s hidden.

            “You’re crazy,” I say to Teddy.

            The phone rings again and my sister is gone. Teddy’s not real tall and our eyes have no place to look but at each other. Probably we’re both red-eyed. “Why do you have to live alone? Families should be families.”

            I sit. He heads into the kitchen. Returns with another beer.

            “The dog sure ain’t moving.”

            I sigh.

            “Move in with someone. One of your girlfriends.”

            “I like living alone.”

            “You sure are here a lot.”

            “I thought you were my family.”

            He looks at me like I’m sitting in one of those English gardens and joins Keebro.

            “That girl knows everything.”

            “You know everything?” Keebro shouts. “I got a couple of questions I need to ask you. What should I ask her?”

            “Ask her who’s going to win this game.”

            “Who’s going to win this game?”

            “The Dodgers,” I say.

            Teddy and Keebro laugh. “They’re ahead,” Keebro says. “I’m taking you to Vegas next time.”

            “Better be careful. She’s getting scared.”

            My sister is still talking. I go in the kitchen. Wave. She looks at me. Squints. Nods.

            As I’m walking towards the door, Teddy says, “Don’t forget what I said.” He jumps up and hands me a joint. Tightly rolled.

            “How can I forget anything if I know everything?” I say and leave.

 

            The moon is full or could be and I can see my way down my driveway without effort. It’s a warm night, still, and quiet. A miracle. My tiny apartment is hidden behind a garage so old and peeling it’s not worth noticing. I am on a hill and can leave my bedroom window open. This is Silverlake. The curtains are pulled back. I see night shades of a desert scene, a desert that has little houses and palm trees like flagpoles in front. There are no colors in my landscape. I light up, take a few drags and put it out. I am looking at everything and I don’t miss myself in this scene. I hold my still life in my vision. There is nothing wrong with this scene.

            And then he barks. It is a constant yelping and serves no purpose. No one is coming. I think of my earplugs and instead choose a pillow in which I try to bury myself. It doesn’t work, so I return to the window, and look out for the people who are awake. 

By Sarah Sarai. Thanks to Cassandra Oxley, editor of stet, for allowing me to reprint.

Take His Wife

Henny Youngman 

We're In Trouble Yesterday

 

 By yesterday I mean today.

By today I mean pick a day.

By Henny Youngman I mean yes.

“My country is so big, when it sits

around the country, it sits around

the world.”

“Take my country [heh heh],

Putin.”

“I booked passage on a one-liner.

Take my wife. Please?”

By my wife I mean my wife.

Sarah Sarai, 2021

First published in Mollyhouse: Issue Two. Apple Books. Raymond Luczak, editor. Poem rights: Sarah Sarai. Feb. 2021. Purchase on Barnes and Noble.

After and Sometimes . a poem from Stonewalls' Legacy Anthology

art: Ashley deLeon Nicole*

After and Sometimes

Relive those parties where every bottle was uncorked and

passed around and everyone smoked everything, double-

checked each auto’s glove box for at least a Sherman or 

a roach. And you left with exactly the wrong woman who 

was exactly the right one, if only for less than twelve hours. 

And not everyone was anything, not white, employed,

focused. And all had self-righteous halos of wild hair 

imperfect as a precisely imprecise stitch in a Persian rug.

You had fun. We all did. It had become more possible.

Sarah Sarai. Stonewalls Legacy: A Poetry Anthology. Hidden Gems Press., Ed. Rusty Rose & Marc Rosen. 2019.

*Ashley DeLeon Nicole https://www.thespruce.com/free-birthday-party-games-1356524

WE KNEW HOW #poem We waited for our laptops to recognize our sovereignty. Were comforted by a lavender mist ... #decomp #SarahSarai

"We Knew How" was published in decomP magazinE, August 2015.
And in Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books).

Like That Strapless Bra! @ https://www.facebook.com/thatstraplessbra/ #poems #poetrycollection

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That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books) is Sarah Sarai's third book and second full-length poetry collection. Click on the link to order. $14! 

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Poems in Strapless were first published in Prelude, Boston Review, Posit, Ethel, Barrow Street, Zocalo Public Square, Oddball, Birds Fall Silent in the Mechanical Sea, Quiddity, Isacoustic, SWWiM, and many other fine journals.