from SORROW ARROW

 

 

Once my sister stopped eating

 

Small wagon

 

There was a place in the neighborhood called Silence-Heart-Nest

Sweet milky rice

 

Sometimes I walk so far for so long that the chalk in my mouth changes to metal

 

I make a baby and shoot it with my sorrow arrow

 

***

 

Out in the world there's another world, hesitating

 

Woman with a visor

 

Man covered in puke

 

Baby eating milk

 

Out of me come barnacles

 

The sky shitting its soft hope

 

There are stretch marks on my past

 

Can I say that?

 

There's a person you see

 

On the beach

 

God or another stranger

 

You sit on a log

 

What's sadder than a car

 

At the beach

 

A car parked

***

 

When I feel like dying I go to bed

 

When I stick my hand in the death flower it holds

 

Turn off that music

 

I name the bear "Bear" and the blanket "Blanket"

 

I wish you didn't have so many small people on your face

***

 

You write the same dirge every day 

 

You eat a snake

 

Grass grows around her and you light it

 

People run up to the heart bulb

 

Sometimes you want to come home 

 

Wreath of black burned grass

 

I had a man like that

 

Every day I walked the pond just a ways from the overpass

 

Moving toward and within parallel lines

 

If I can just stay one current away 

 

Glass of ice

 

Uselessly I entered him

 

We use people as paper cups

 

Write in pen

 

Make it sad so it won't come near again

________________________________________

Emily Kendal Frey is the author of The Grief Performance (published by Cleveland State University Poetry Center in 2011) as well as several

chapbooks and chapbook collaborations. She lives in Portland, Oregon, where she hosts the New Privacy series.