Sarah Sarai | Low Life, Malibu

Low Life, Malibu

 

Buoyant and so damn blasé about it,

the ducks are all You looking at me?

I can float, sucker.

 

While those puffed-up fighter pilot

gulls straight up sneer, Haw! Haw!

fools, we’re slumming it.

 

Unhinged as their jaws, they swoop in

on darting fish close to the surface,

then circle our scraps for dessert.

 

You and me, slouched on wet sand, we

feel the day’s chill as a flesh-crawling

parasite. We consider following

 

the sun as she shimmies down,

searching new and newer horizons,

and each time, we invite her to join us,

 

up the highway, in a cracked red-

leather booth shaped like a crescent moon.

She might want to but never shows.

 

We’re not big on duty, but we get it.

We have us one responsible sun.

The I’m-all-that flighty couldn’t care less.

 

 

Previously published in Pine Hills Review, August 2, 2023.

 

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Sarah Sarai is the author of several poetry collections including That Strapless Bra in Heaven (Kelsay Books, 2019); Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books, 2016); and The Future Is Happy (BlazeVOX Books, 2009). Her poems are widely anthologized, most notably in Gerald LaFemina’s Composing Poetry, a Guide to Writing Poems and Thinking Lyrically (Kendall Hunt Publishing, 2016); Like a Fat Gold Watch: Poetic Responses to Sylvia Plath edited by Christine Hamm (Fat Gold Watch Press, Brooklyn, 2018) and Say It Loud: Poems About James Brown edited by Michael Oatman and Mary Weems (Whirlwind Press, 2011). A native New Yorker, born in Long Island, she grew up in Los Angeles, returning to attend Sarah Lawrence where she earned her MFA. She currently lives in the big city and works as an independent editor.

Sarah Sarai | A Thousand Deaths

A Thousand Deaths

 

Jack’s in Wisconsin with a girlfriend

whose father is down one cow,

which I become in its death,

the wandering-off cow Jack finds

“out in the woods with its legs sticking /

straight up to the stars.”

Its unborn calf is by its side.

Eight dead cow-legs point out

two escaped cow-souls.

And so I become animal mother

sorrow, my eyes aching and red,

searching night skies.

My legs pointing to the endless.

I am galled by the up and

down of love, a boulder

hard-shouldered every day.

 

Quote from “Thinning the Herd,” I Have No Clue by Jack Wiler (Longshot Press, 1996)

 

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Photo by Amy Holman

Sarah Sarai has published two to three poetry collections, depending on how you reckon, and a bunch of short stories. A native New Yorker, she lives in the big city, where she is an independent editor of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction.

Sarah Sarai | Three Children Are Laughing

Three Children Are Laughing

They fall and float up.
Heaven is deep space, the moon.
They were not issued boots.
They don’t care. They are angels.
They wear taffetas, twinsets,
garlands of sorrow strung on ivory,
eat five grams of Cheerios
every ten years if that is what they
need to count tulips ochers
of the dust we once thought
was all there was to life.


Originally published in Peacock Journal.

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Sarah Sarai’s poems appear in Barrow Street, Prelude, POOL, E-ratio, Zocalo Public Square, Boston Review, and many other journals. Her second full-length collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven, was published by Kelsay Books. She is an independent editor in New York, where she volunteers teaching manners to pigeons.