by Sara Backer

because the sky was my first friend

Because my skeleton—big-skulled, brutish—looks nothing like me,
because I don’t want to injure the ground by drenching myself in formaldehyde,
because numbers on a stone marker record the least important thing about my life,
because I never got along well with my body,
because I don’t want to be Poor Yoricked,
because as a child I watched embers float from our incinerator to tree tops and thought it magic,
light me a fire of oak and pine, let me disappear in flames, toss my few pounds
of gritty sand into an ocean pulled by an iron-cored moon
and remember only that I loved being a speck of this.

My balance falters in garudasana

Posing as the firebird Garuda, left foot hooked
over right talon, right elbow crooked in left wing,
I braid myself into a rope

pressing my palms together, arm-wrestling myself to hold in
the explosion of Vishnu
for eternity—or until I wobble.

So much depends upon the spot where foot meets earth.
Why try to hold still? Dancers say
balance must be lost before it can be found.

Vishnu’s demon-slicing discus rhumbas
with the fertile pink conch. His spiky mace tangos
with the folded soul of the lotus.

I imagine us dancing hand over hand, forming an ouroboros.
The world we dance on dances, too.
Spinning water orbits spinning fire.

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Sara Backer’s first book of poetry, Such Luck (Flowstone Press 2019) follows two chapbooks: Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press) and Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork). She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, lives in New Hampshire, and teaches at UMass Lowell.