SARAH ALCAIDE-ESCUE / 3 POEMS
PORTRAIT OF MYSELF AS FOG IN THIRD PERSON
she waits in the velvet dark
like salted hides stacked for drying
a dead language emerges from her tongue
in fragments fractals—a lineage of mirrors
words soften like borrowed light
the lacuna between moon and sun
opens like a suitcase theatre
loss is a pair of broken spines strung up
a twisted staircase relics of what once was
what won’t be again a bird is only
heavy
when it falls
FROM SEASON OF HUNGER
starlings murmur to upturned stones / their sternums splinter / as they collect the field’s plumed harvest / they build a room of cocoons / gossamer homes which crystallize us / like plums in jars of sugar / & the oceans spin-drift / as you pry apart mussels / & de-bone fish / as you anoint land with salt / the body as an exit / wound like / that one poem / always the rupture / never the conception / the patch sewn to the knee of hand-me-down jeans / ways in which a {cell, star, muscle} cleaves / you cleave / you whose bones crystallize / like plums in jars of sugar / our sin / still coating the ribs / of a unnamed animal
::
here’s the valley: river-split
opening as the wolf’s jaws
pine after the lone deer
who drinks from a puddle
in the parking lot
of an abandoned gas station
[ ] flesh conceals [ ] what can be harvested —
those parts that get picked & boiled
dried & stored for another time perhaps
If there’s a pattern
there’s a pattern
DECIDUOUS
light hemorrhages
against
forest as nerves slip
sacrament sacrum holy (b)order
wounded language the way language often wounds a nation
memory a shadow cast as heaved hollow
half-words for fallow furrows
i
( ) carry )
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this season’s rot ting anthol ogie s
of langua ge fold r ock
she d
th eir shape
s often as chalk rid ges in seas
re aching for
salt y mar gi ns
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Sarah Alcaide-Escue is a writer and multi-disciplinary artist. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Diagram, Mud Season Review, Permafrost Magazine, Bombay Gin, and Dialogist, among others. She's an editor at The Adirondack Review and reader for Plath Profiles. You can visit her website at www.sarahescue.com.