SARA SOWERS-WILLS / 5 POEMS THROUGH A BROKEN TERRAIN
Shine, Orphan Eyes
With long elastic arms, the survivor gathers
orphans in clusters, stem by stem, stumbling
in the chafing disgrace of tongue & teeth.
The sound of dental scraping cores the core
where every tree root meets.
He rises
early from yesterday’s drift, cold into orange
morn. Puzzles the blizzard. Shine, orphan eyes.
—Don’t look too long, they say. Our hearts will fall
out. The heart is not patched like news.
journal excerpt: notes on the orphans
The first one spotted me. Like a lynx, he darted across the alley, dirty nostril peeking round the stone. He looked past me, never into my eyes.
The second one was bolder. Threw a stone to land just in front of me. Didn’t want me hurt, but made a show.
The third one had long hair, dark and unwashed, hung over those beetled-eyes, dressed in a too-big t-shirt, probably dumpster-scavenged.
The fourth one had no reservations—positioned herself like a spoiled tree, a spit’s distance from me, looking like to speak. But didn’t.
**
In time there were hordes. I lost count. They moved in clusters, like balloons lost to the sky. They wanted something from me for me with me. I wasn’t sure the orientation of their want, but my attention was theirs. From this unspeech, threads tethered our wills.
Tulip
The cardboard box arrived.
Left on the artificial grass
covering the cement
stoop. He’d ordered
lactation-ready breasts
in case the orphans came by
hungry, the squirrels uncatchable.
He tried.
All one can do is try
when born a tulip
during apocalypse
without the gift of foresight.
Pragmatism
Rotted right off, the breasts.
Made of cheap plastic
but looked the part.
Couldn’t survive the sweat
of hiking the gorge
from youth to sonic death.
The fleeting nature
of our parts makes it hard
to have perspective
on purpose and lasting
from within our own skin.
What story will we be
remembered in
and as what character?
And what use
will the plot be
to anyone?
The Orphans
It wasn’t for prosthetic breast milk that they were hungry.
They’d collected their ideas for unity
scratched on dead leaves.
The Survivor pressed them for answers,
commanded, “Shine.”
Advised, “Piety
is why we do things without knowing why.”
But why is the world a place
where a man tumbles down a staircase and dies?
The sadness in their eyes,
liquid marbles, was language enough.
Silica crystallizes and the process repeats.
He hadn’t been listening.
They’d warned, “Don’t look too long.
Our hearts will fall out.” Agates from a tumbler.
But he looked. And he saw
lynx and rats and human soul and robin
drop dead around them.
They named him Survivor
because he’d asked them to.
Like everybody else who keeps going on bone-cold days,
he wanted to believe he could.
They weren’t so sure.
If all the agates were false idols
they’d need to come together—see differently.
They raked together all the dead
leaves. Piled them onto a sled fashioned from cardboard.
Swiveled their heads to monitor the Survivor’s
heart. When he wasn’t looking
they pushed—
Sara Sowers-Wills teaches linguistics and professional writing at the University of Minnesota Duluth. Her poems have appeared in Jet Fuel Review, Sonic Boom, The Broken Spine, Thimble Literary Magazine, Pleiades, Interim, and elsewhere. She researches topics relating to constructed languages and cognitive linguistics, and lives in Duluth with her husband and two daughters.