Author: Sarah Russell

Cleats

After practice, my son kicks off his cleats
and leaves them under the front seat.
He treats the van like a storage locker,
draping his uniform and sweats around.
The daughter complains each morning
as I take her to school. The cleats smell.
They’re in her way. It’s not fair. I agree
with all of these points, and yet I don’t
tell the son to move them. For one,
it’s yet another argument I’m too tired
to have. There are already so many things
I’m prodding him about: homework,
showers, closing doors, drinking water …
and, to be honest, I kind of like them there,
this mark of the boy, these muddy talismans.
He used to hold my hand as he fell asleep,
and once he pulled his fingers away,
picked his nose, then slid them back in my palm.
Yes, this is love, I thought then, holding snot

After the tremors and reverberations of the explosions have passed, Mr. Beauchamp emerges, brave on feeble legs, from the tiny flea circus of a studio overlooking Beirut. His grey beard is somber enough for the occasion, thick with saline as he views his smoking city through an afghan of debris. A woman wailing swallows her sobs long enough to watch familiar Mr. Beauchamp head toward the square. He scrapes his box along the ground, lifting it gently at every step and crevice, though it may weigh more than his fragile, tweed-clad body.

The black box looks funerary, ancient paint chipped to reveal splinters of the light wood from which it is constructed, the cold metal handle small enough to dig uncomfortably into any hand that might attempt to carry it. The box is unusually heavy; most people pick it up twice, attempting once and then re-thinking their technique. If they…

after Donna Tartt

If there was ever a night to forgive
clumsy feet and hands reaching for
the unutterable,

we had reached it. Before leaving,
you had kissed your mother, even
your father,

both of whom would outlive you. This
is not the way the world should end,
fifty miles from home, earth reaching
up to take back

what it created long ago. Try as we may
to avoid it, lives dwindle. Try as we may to
avoid it, we are left with

blood-stained clothes and love, so much
love and no containers to fill it with.
Your mother sentenced

to collect dead children like stamps or
dust in corners. Your mother fumbling
against the darkest edge

of the universe from which all light must
reflect again, which is to say there is
a version of this life

where everything we’ve lost has already
been returned to us. I loved…

My poem, NYC-1968 just appeared in issue 23 of Misfit Magazine.  Here is the poem:

New York City, 1968

I
When last we met
we sat on a stone bench
in Central Park.
Frost had put paid to summer
and the big trees shivered
in the tepid sun.
We fed a squirrel
the remains of your lunch.
You said the draftees
had left
from Grand Central Station
that morning–
your fallen face
the color of the gunmetal sky.
That winter the water main
broke on the avenue
that ran along the park.
For months, we had to take
the long way home.

II
When last we met
we were in an apartment
in the East Village–
above the shop
that advertised “Fresh Produce.”
You said the Weathermen
had blown out all the windows.
We sat on the floor
in the hellish heat
and the stench of overripe melon.
A cloud…