Author: Sarah Russell

Retired professor and editor, now writing poetry and short fiction.

Stillborn

Sarah Russell11 Comments

My friend Ryan Stone has a poem in the August issue of Red River Review.  I’ll reprint the poem as well as links both to his blog, Days of Stone, and to the journal.  Many fine poems on both venues.

Although science, with clinical wisdom
declared her not yet a person,
a heartbeat argued defiantly
for a night.

We visit the cemetery —
hands entwined, minds
in different hemispheres,
hearts mangled. In a quiet corner

where the sun lingers late in summer,
where gelid moans soften in winter,
we become broken pieces
of something once much stronger.

– Ryan Stone

Figure Drawing at Community College

Sarah Russell48 Comments

This flash piece was just published in Rusty Truck.  Thanks, Scot!

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I’m getting goosebumps from a draft, though the class doesn’t notice. Most are open-mouthed, charcoal scratching paper, concentrating on the weight of my breast, curve of hip, sag of buttock. I bite my lip, think of the rigidity of a villanelle, try to compose one in my head while the old guy in a beret for god’s sake, studies the cleft, the pubic mound, then meets my eyes.

I want to yell, “I just want to earn enough to get cable,” but I look away, try to show disgust without showing disgust because the woman who will pick up kids from school at 4 is drawing my face. My arm is falling asleep. The instructor said to tell her when I need a break, but the young man by the window is so intent, I hate to interrupt him. I start to tremble, try to shift but not throw off the line. The villanelle becomes a limerick.

There once was a nude on a table
Who couldn’t afford to get cable…

Trembling. Can’t feel my arm at all.

She posed for a class
Where an old man was crass,

Ah, the instructor is announcing a break. I raise my body off my arm and feel electric shocks as blood starts to flow. I reach for my kimono. The old guy sidles up to me.

“Coffee later if you are able?” he asks. Shit, he’s finished my limerick. I walk away rubbing my arm. “Maybe tomorrow?” he calls.

– Sarah Russell

Rust Belt

“. . .empty factories and gutted storefronts. . .”

Sarah Russell15 Comments

Rust Belt

Sure, we loved the hats and hoopla
the rhythmic chants of lock her up,
but we are not a stupid people.
We know full well this patchy place
between the slag heaps
and the scrub pine–
these crumbling houses perched behind
the padlocked plant once known
for truck tires,
will never be great—
or even good.

You say rust belt
and mean the measure
of empty factories
and gutted storefronts.
The jobs bled out.
The eyesores left behind to moulder.
But the rust is mostly in us.
Too many years of children
born to little hope.
Too many years of promises
from windbags in dingy union halls
and air-conditioned buses
painted red, white, and blue.

This afternoon, I take my maul
to the wood pile
by the rusted chain link fence.
Crisp and clear,
It is a fine day to bust things up–
And the making
of that splintered shattered kindling
with a body that burns
is as near as I will ever come to joy.

– Steven Deutsch
First published in New Verse News

July 4th Memories

Sarah Russell5 Comments

My friend John Ziegler posted this nostalgic look back at July 4th celebrations on Facebook.  Hope you all enjoy it.

As kids we were keenly aware that the Fourth of July, had been federally designated to celebrate our nation’s independence so first thing that morning we put on our  shorts, white tee shirts and Keds, ready to run fast, make noise and eat ice cream. Teddy and Frankie came to the back porch with green carbide canons, tubes of Bangsite, and strings of fire crackers Teddy smuggled from Canada during a fishing trip. We had sparklers and candy. There was always candy involved. Mr. Mallory’s Corner Grocery had glass cases dazzling with penny candy, so our pockets were sticky with sweet, colorful wads.

The next door neighbor had a vintage ice cream maker, with rotating wooden barrel, chain driven, filled with ice and rock salt that surrounded the steel canister of ingredients, cream, sugar, cherries or strawberries. The process started in the morning with the ice cream finally ready at dusk.

Eagerly awaited, this was a day of adventure. After a bike ride to the vacant field behind the Masonic Temple we lay in the warm grass watching clouds evolve. Out of curiosity and a rasher of bravado, Frankie laid a fire cracker across his sneaker and lit it with an Ohio Blue Tip. The fuse sparked, grew short, disappeared and when the little red tube exploded, Frankie jumped three feet and bellowed like a mule. He walked with a limp the next few hours but recovered by the time foot races began with Albert Cassone.

Albert Cassone was an odd man of sixty something who lived in a brick row house a couple of blocks down Franklin Street. Black business pants, pressed white shirt open at the collar and wing tip dress shoes he arrived in our back alley with a pocket full of coins to challenge any and all in a foot race to the third black tar line, for a dime. Everyone got in line, everyone ran faster than wind. Everyone got dimes.

Late in the day the parents whistled the family signal to come home for the picnic. We easily ate three or four loaded hot dogs from the charcoal grill, along with macaroni salad, baked beans, carrot strips, black olives followed by a couple of kinds of cake and finally the home made ice cream. We hardly ever threw up.

When the sky finally grew dusky, fireworks lit up the fairgrounds, loud and bright, concussions shook the air, clouds of smoke softly disappeared in the dark, the whole world drifted in a dream and the country was secured in independence for another year.

 John Ziegler

Petrichor

Sarah Russell58 Comments

Start with a kiln-dry summer day,
when the earth cracks with longing,
and sweat makes tracks between your breasts.

The air’s so still you hear a beetle scuttle
on the screen, the sun dims in a sullen sky,
and crickets stop chirping. Maybe they know
what’s coming, or they’re tired of asking.

Then it starts – the first lazy drops –
and when the wooden porch step’s dappled,
you go out and lift your face to the embrace
and breathe in the mix of dust and rain
like a lover’s musk.

– Sarah Russell
First published in The Houseboat

The Thief

Sarah Russell4 Comments

An allegory for our times.

perfectsublimemasters's avatarEunoia Review

Each day he took something. The right breast of the mother. The grandfather’s supper. The child’s teacher. Sometimes he’d leave something in exchange, but it was always lesser.

Selma’s black hair was replaced with gray. Over time, her brush stilled, her studio emptied. Once she heard the eagle’s cry and her heart opened like a red barn door, then the crack of a rifle and the door slammed shut. She kept one brown feather. During the days that grew windy and progressively darker, she’d stand at the window and run a finger up and down the feather, its softness a comfort, a reminder.

But still he took something beautiful and left something ugly. Civility became extinct, like the eagle and the wolf, and in its place was built a long wall separating her old country from her new one.

Without her art, she took to pacing her side of the…

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Everything Becomes a Stranger

“. . . a poem is a silent tree in spate . . .”

Sarah Russell19 Comments

This morning I read a new poem by Rajani Radhakrishnan that is a perfect description of how a poem is made and who it becomes as we let it go.  Rajani gave me permission to reblog it, so here it is.  Please visit her site, ThotPurge to thank her, and while you’re there check out her second blog Phantom Road  where she converses with Marcus in a series of haibun poems — equally as evocative.  Rajani, I am so grateful to have discovered your poetry.

Everything Becomes A Stranger

even a word in a sentence,
you hold it there, lock it in and
for a while it makes sense
then it begins to work itself loose
wanting to move
wanting to move on
another appears in its place
an unfamiliar voice,
saying something else;

a poem is a silent tree in spate
one by one its green eyes fall
one by one new eyebrows are raised
only you know it is a different tree
the shadows paint another dark
and whatever is flowering
is not caused by your being;

everything becomes a stranger
once it leaves, once it falls
words, worlds,
people,
even you walking away
carrying a poem
carrying a sentence
cast shapes angled into the sun
as if the light is making love to you
in a different language.

– Rajani Radhakrishnan

 

Nesting

Sarah Russell26 Comments

The finches are courting
outside our window, a warbled
discussion of real estate and love.
Like last year and the year before,
they want to lease the flower wreath
on our front door. It’s always a dilemma:
discourage their rapture or detour
through the garage?

The finches always win. So
for a month we’ll wake to overtures
at dawn – so cheerful, so loud –
show pictures of pin-feathered babies
to friends, recall demands
and pleasures of our own brood,
the bittersweet fledging.

– Sarah Russell
First published by Your Daily Poem
The photo is of their nest last year.

Thought this was apropos since Mr. and Mrs. Finch are back and are quite excited about our new wreath this year.  They were both tucked into a niche behind the blossoms, discussing the furnishings when I opened the door this morning.  The nest was almost complete this afternoon.  Can’t deny true love.