3 poems
Tempest
—you, me, Celia
Reaching for your deepest voice, you rock yourself
blindfolded in the storm—uncoupling
flashes of light from the ravishing claps
that plunge us back, each, into ourselves stunned brute
as sky. Rain blows down down through the tree cover
and fans across the windows. An elastic waistband
snaps on skin, muffle of the bedclothes on the floorboards.
Celia climbs on top of you, a moth crushed between her lips.
She leans close to your face to exhale broken wings.
Push into her and brighten the air with our hunger.
Not crashing, not safely, I swear, I swear I am
the fevered one on the naked air mattress
slick with premonitions on the rubber bed.
An unwashed quilt plaits my breaking sweat,
you opened a hot hands packet for my socks. Go ruin
a life with sex and songs hissed into yellow pillows.
The thunder turns the air to lace. You monster of thresholds.
Can’t pretend to sleep. Who calls out, who blurs, who laughs into her hair.
Rest
wings toward the grey daze
right above the tree line. Rest cannot
dodge the many minds sharp in air,
cannot sound, cannot envelop
the lowest register of sky.
And I lie
beside you. I have the water.
I know
what depth charge is
strapped to the board you wield when you
descend to dreaming.
I pray its wire loop will not hold.
Snare
She tried to take her hands apart
with just her teeth. Only warm-dead. No,
it is the sun coming over our flat roof.
I was going to let myself into my parents’ place to take a good bath.
The steel trap Dad stationed snared her without severing bones.
The raccoon writhed around the porch, scattered
cat food, flipped the cage, fury-flurried, bled to death.
Her gaze materialized from their den in the underbrush,
cooing, chittering into her open-mouthed passing.
I unfastened the capture and wrapped her in my sweater.
I walked her to the cul-de-sac dumpster.
I’ll wash my hands with gin. I don’t care.
Without the camera, there is no ritual.
I track her blood to the screen door
and its inept apertures sifting the sunset.
It falls pink and wrong on the living room floor.
Sara Ellen Fowler is a writer and artist living in Los Angeles, CA. Her work has appeared in The Offing, X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal, RHINO Poetry, and Full Stop, among others. A Community of Writers alum, Sara holds a BFA in Sculpture from Art Center College of Design and is an MFA candidate in Poetry at UC Riverside.