This month we are featuring the poets and writers who have signed with us in the past six months—all writers who submitted work during one of our two annual open reading periods.
Today we bring you Sara Lefsyk, whose poetry collection We Are Hopelessly Small and Modern Birds will be published in May of 2018.
The Author
Excerpt
THIS IS AGONY: beneath America there is another more American America. There is a strange sky created by multiple age-old functional systems and even the suicidal eyes of miniature birds say: nothing is ancient anymore anyway.
There is no hidden mouth the whiteness of fields holds vigil over.
Of all things I buried my windows and all the snapshots of a man taking snapshots of me burying my windows.
Who’s going to build my mind a modern-day kitchen?
Whose going to loan me leg room in the National Public Hospital of Kentucky? Because the water that is in us is very psychological and sometimes seems like another whole person altogether.
Sometimes our bodies become very historical.
At the old train yard, Kant’s body stands on air and I run my fingers over his face then mine to compare the different ways we’re each asleep.
“When the Messiah comes,” Kant says: “let’s invite him over to my place and medicate our roosters, then fly them up to The National Public Archives and buy ourselves some real-nice sweaters.”
I’M TIRED OF THESE SORTS OF WALLS never being quite big enough to see through. Or if only they were transparent and we could thread our bodies to some sort of International Museum of Sleep Deprivation. Or surface walking. Or both.
Then maybe we could skip eviction and take up malaria as a hobby. Here. In this house.
But the Socialists have been preparing for this for thousands of years and so Kant has emptied his apartment and I have taken my pigeons out into the streets to snack on various sorts of breads and cheeses.
And because I am terrified of certain types of art and kitchens and Kant has a momentary hunger for hallucinogens and wild carp, we ride our bicycles out to the National Public Pharmacies
behind the river but in front of the sea.
From this place we can feel our bodies pass through a banknote: “and so maybe,” Kant says: “we have been digging holes and lying beside them this whole time after all.”
Indeed, we could compose A Book of Serious Medications and live off it for weeks!
IN THE EVENT THAT WE ARE, AFTER ALL, only giant holographic images of one another, Kant and I reach into the cloud chamber to get a realtrue sense of things.
And while I have devoted my life to writing my master’s thesis on the transcription of bird shapes and animal voices, Kant rolls out his projector and screen and swims for hours in a film of the sea.
When we describe what it’s like to see what we have seen we say: when you invent things like light you really do suffer
and: I’m afraid the height of your eyes will expand in my abdomen and cause all the little birds buried there to decompose before their time.
This one thing is necessary.
Throughout the day my body becomes a millennium of seagulls and seashit and it’s as if I had spent the whole night in the arms of some deadman and for this reason I can’t understand how there is so much solitude in Kant’s fingers and why his veins carry him so much as if through an insomnia of underground tunnels and cabins.
In the morning, we abandon our footsteps and the southern-most point of this goddamned earth is such a circling in my eyes that Kant must cover his ears as I become astronomical in distance.
Above us, the Socialist Party is laying tin cans over the roof so that, when the bigbig rain comes, we may all sleep imprisoned somewhere between the landscape of the rooster and the landscape of the sea.