Sara Quinn Rivara: The Thing with Feathers
Hope is kidnap, is clamor. Is the broke-down truck, is how a girl can be smart and fucked. Is salt, fir, moss. Hope is ocean, fire, my boy’s feet tucked beneath my hip. A hinge, an edge. A woman’s body is the selvage end, is the field where all things grow. A match tossed in the brush pile. Let it burn. Let the past collapse in a heap. To live with fear is a kind of death. My son shifts in his sleep, puts his head on my breast. There was once a tearing, cloth caught on a razor wire. Or it was my flesh. My soft girlskin like a wedding dress. It was the rest of my life, torn out, flying.
Wet Dream
A river, oil slick, electric eels. Warm water, turgid, brown as sewage, as a song sparrow singing from the marsh edge. The Great Dictator in his grey jumpsuit motors up, the boat gilded with cherries. Sunglasses, two peat fires, two blank mirrors. A sheep’s stomach stuffed with doves. Trees scrabble up the inky bank. The sky an aborted blue. And the eels snap live wires at my feet. The boat lists and the motor trails a winding sheet of exhaust, oil, weeds, cassette tapes, women’s hair, cabbage roses, columbine, the Shroud of Turin sewn into a wedding veil. Don’t you love me? the Great Dictator asks, his small fist at my throat. My ass round as a cantaloupe. Eels flicker like dwarf stars. The rush of black wings. He tries to flick his cigarette onto the turf. He drools on his polyester shirt. Pompadour catches the sunset like a postcard: wish I was never here.
SARA QUINN RIVARA’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous places, including
RHINO, Split Lip, Word Riot, The Fem,
Blackbird, Midwestern Gothic, Bluestem, Tinderbox Poetry
Journal, Poemeleon, 32 Poems, The Cortland Review,
and many others. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart, won Midwestern
Gothic’s Lake Prize, and been featured at Late Night Library. She is the author
of a chapbook, Lake Effect, from Aldrich Press (2013) and the forthcoming
collection Animal Bride (ELJ Editions, 2017). She lives in Portland,
Oregon, with her family. More from this
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