by Sara Kearns
Sara Kearns is the author of the chapbook, Incisor, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She has been a runner-up for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New Issues First Book Award. She teaches writing in Pittsburgh and creates polls for IMDb.
Maybe god does exist
and saw me as I played in the woods,
swinging my hair and snapping daisies at their necks.
Maybe I splashed in the swamp.
Maybe I was reckless and my eyes wild,
singing Ladybug Ladybug and galloping.
I remember stealing honey from bees.
I remember climbing sugar trees
and digging with spoons.
For just a moment, at the very beginning,
before I even recognized time,
I thought life was to be lived,
so I swung my fishtail in and out of the sea.
That is when misery found me.
And followed me through the stitched afternoons of the city.
when i open my mouth, i hear generations
My desire is ancestral, enough that it would scare you.
My mother on a mattress with four sisters,
legs dangling onto the sawdust floor,
another sister given to a relative with food.
She taught me many words for that kind of hunger:
deer tracks, bread lines, typhus, love.
Denial of love. And my father taught me this:
An Drochshaol. Black 47. A roof without a sky.
A bay window as a bed, their memories
are mine. What’s trust when there’s never enough?
I swallow whole, my hands like locks.
Take me, take me,
my hunger will let you have me.