[Sarah is a series of sonnets]

Sarah is a series of sonnets in a long section of an old book she has never read. Sometimes she is broken into couplets, sometimes octave and sestet, quatrains and couplet; sometimes she is not broken at all.

Sometimes Sarah is not a sonnet at all except that she is called one. She asks her students to read their poems out loud because poems do not really exist until they are called up, like children for dinner, like the dead from their graves.

Everyone is hungry for something. The sonnets are about an old farmhouse property and dwell longingly on Minnesota dendrology. Inside, a pressed leaf serves as what Sarah must assume is a bookmark. The old patriarch of the poem cycle is buried somewhere on the property. The sonnets speak to him. His body breaks down the way the poems do, into pieces, which makes him more useful to the future, not less.

Sarah wonders if the reader ever reached the end of the book before they stopped reading it. She wonders if the man reached the end of his life before he stopped living it. The leaf holds firm against time. The spine smells more like adhesive every day, but slowly, now, the pages are beginning to go.