Sara Backer has two chapbooks: Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork) which won the Turtle Island Poetry Award and Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press). A book of poetry, Such Luck, is forthcoming from Flowstone Press. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts and has recent or upcoming poems in Qu, Nonbinary Review, Crannóg, Tar River Poetry, Noble/Gas Qrtly, Hawaii Pacific Review, and Gargoyle. Website: sarabacker.com.
The Furious Gazelle
Literary as hell.
Tag: poem (page 1 of 7)
People always say that size matters.
But these days, it’s hard to know what’s true.
So I studied the subject for myself—to see
if the reports I’d heard were just fake news.
Science says Frenchmen have the largest members.
Monsieur Bedel indeed insisted
his was best and that I kiss it! kiss it!
A frog with frantic aim, he lashed about:
a series of this and that—quick in, quicker out.
As if to whip a fly from my cervix,
he jerked his darting la queue faster than a blink.
City blue Continue reading
One day I’ll be dead before I know it
and then I’ll know it, I guess, only too
well but instead of looking backward I’ll
try to see has Eternity any
forward or ahead to it, somehow I
doubt it now but then I’m only alive
and just ten years old to boot and sometimes
Apparitions
I’ve seen them
in a breeze or a rain drop
A slow shadow or stunning beam
of light through the trees landing
on my child’s eyelash creating God
in a prism Continue reading
If a couple gets married
and one commits suicide on February 11th,
is it anyone’s fault?
Feminists can blame all they want.
Husbands can lament and take lashes
while they rewrite poetry.
Like a blinking eye that opens then closes-
what is-is. Unless it isn’t.
Depression was a black lung hung off
a rat’s tail on the tree by her window or-
asbestos pilled on plumbing pipes-unwrapped
and falling like snow-long before they said, ‘I DO.’
Long before, Sylvia swallowed 48 pills, slept
beneath her house, woke to try again.
Marriage is hard, poets complex,
Poetry is hard, marriage complex.
Like pulled threads in a sweater, they unraveled.
Depression created a triangle.
Factor in children and the figure converted
to a love pentagon-where two people wanted winged
poems sailing space and three sides were left hanging.
Pentagon then add a lover? That’s a hexagon.
The shape shifted, lost all sides, became thread-a heart,
became a pneumatic noose around a head roast.
Sylvia gasped air and faltered, fell asleep.
She wrote every day in the dark before a baby
banged pots on the floor, uttered, ‘ma-ma,’
while Ted left to write, wrangle crows.
Rejection lassoes perfection.
How romantic-two poets in the same house-
unparalleled love letters, mirrored muses:
in truth, for them, it was murder-
no, it was a contest-
no, it was academia-
publish, perish, publish, Pulitzer-no
noose was wide enough to capture
the universe of words that broke them-
no-broke her.
Instead of a valentine,
the noose became a knot.
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