Cold comfort
Winter walks the corridors. Her footsteps
resonate in the stairwell with a blasting echo -
nearer and nearer.
I sit up in the bedclothes.
Her voice is chilly, her hands like icicles,
but she comes to find me in this place.
Winter says my name,
cradles my face, does not allow me to flinch or blink.
But when tears simmer in my eyes, I can suddenly see.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2009
Connections
We breathe the exhalations
of dodo birds and mastodons,
share DNA with dinosaurs,
seep fluids that sloshed in beings
who first turned sunlight into air.
My image is recorded
in the texture of your irises;
my voice reverberates
minutely in your bones.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2007
Stillness In Motion
The rope that dangles over still water from a tree branch
old enough to remember God.
The summer breeze that sets it swaying.
The echoes of bawdy adolescent boys,
the curving pull that launches them flying,
the silence in the splash.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 2000
Test
Silken sounds of wind brush against the microphone.
The world outside is a monochrome square.
Inside the stone cocoon is mostly silence. Some murmuring.
In the view through the square,
Earth explodes in a rising pillar of fire and smoke
spreads across the sky – a ceiling of storms.
Shrieks from the microphone – hastily modulated feedback.
Later, it is noted that dirt became glass and splintered,
that neither leaves nor skeletons of trees remain except as shadows
on the desert floor, that the wind rustles anxiously,
skittering debris across the scarred landscape
like a cat with a bit of crumpled foil.
A bigger bang than before.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 1999
Dance With Me
You would like to wrap me up in white canvas
in my own embrace.
I am freer than your nod of approval can make me.
You are a callus
where a child’s eager whys rubbed up against cement brick certainty.
Even now, ghouls with fingerpainty fingers
stir in your skull to dance with me.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 1999
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My Grandmother and the President
Standing, I was only as high as the coffee-ringed formica table.
Sitting in the chair that could have fit 2 of me
I squirmed like a bound-and-gagged Houdini.
My grandmother sat as still as the air before an August thunderstorm
and as sullen.
Periodically she would shake loose a cigarette,
perch it on her bottom lip with resentful hunger,
eye the powder blue Bic with hatred
when it resisted her tiny flailing attempts to strike a light
with shivering fingers.
The TV buzzed and shimmered in the corner of my eye
as she took frail gulps of cranberry juice heavily scented with vodka.
She avoided looking at me
but when I slouched, she never failed to correct me
with the point of her pencil in the small of my back.
I glared at my coloring and broke the tip of my crayon.
My grandmother said that when she worked for Efdeearr
she used to speak to big important men, hold the line for them -
she knew their voices already from the radio.
(before she’d washed too many shirts
with her husband’s name on the pocket and made too many dinners
on a shoestring, and took to wearing rhinestones.)
I stared through the scattered sprawl of crayons and crumpled paper,
suddenly seeing her young and pretty, uniformed, straight-backed
as supervisors prowled like polyester vultures.
I guessed they must have been important somebodies
for her to smirk and brush their names off her lips
like a precarious finger of ash.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 1999
Only So Long Before
My friend told me he wanted to be a kid again,
“to abdicate the responsibilities of adulthood,
to have nothing to worry about but toys and snack time.”
I felt my molars dig in,
shredding unspoken words between them.
Cloy of chalk dust in the nostrils.
The teacher has eyes that watch sideways
like Mona Lisa even when she isn’t looking.
Outside, too warm in coat, mittens, boots, gagging on cold air,
I stumble, fall, and rest, snuggled in the fat thighs of tree roots,
insulated from gleeful shrieks a hundred yards away.
There are no broad-backed maples in a classroom, but there are books.
Resting in the gritty, sticky metal trough under the desktop an open novel
tugs me away from filthy rough carpets and wobbly graffiti.
Gradually others forget to pinch,
and my neighbor on the right loses interest in embezzling my pencils.
The teacher grudgingly scratches a star
on my spelling test. I learn not to smile
when I see that, but it’s golden armor
the next time someone calls me fat.
I learned to speak
above a whisper, to walk
like I belonged to whatever place I was in,
to explode out of my eyes.
I was sitting under a tree when he told me
about going back to the paradise of four feet and under.
Slowly I leaned back and then pegged a branch with a few pebbles.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 1999
Snow Dancing
She has not burned herself on ice,
felt blood pound like a mallet on hot iron, shading from neon to cherry red,
cut herself on crystals delicate as flowers,
shuddered as skin shrunk and shriveled towards its inner warmth,
grimaced as bones grew fangs and gnawed on themselves for comfort,
yelped to hear the sound whip through the frigid air,
leapt to give frost-numbed feet relief,
danced to still the inward clamor of minutely quaking muscles,
gazed up to blind herself in a blue so intense that it turns the sun to pale shards of rainbow.
She goes out in slippers to get the mail, and hurries back to the softened inside air.
She says I will catch my death.
Death can catch me if he can.
(c) Sarah Morehouse 1999
