Poetry by Sarah Blake

It is. I am. I do.

 

For weeks she said, I do, when she could. Do you
know how to get home from here? I do. Do you want
to go to bed? I do. Yes fell out of her vocabulary.
Is that right? It is. Are you still tired? I am. Do you
want to see a doctor? I do. I do. I do.  The doctors
thought they could increase circulation if they fixed
arteries on her heart. Do you want that? I do. But she
had too much radiation as a child. When they opened
her, her sternum shattered. They couldn’t close her.
Didn’t they know? They didn’t. How? They rebuilt
her heart, but her body couldn’t heal to hold it. Will
I be ok? Yes. Will we be married? So many times.

 

(Sarah’s note: originally composed this poem while at TCNJ, appeared in Michigan Quarterly Review’s Spring 2010 issue)

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Form

 

I’m well versed in theories. My favorite is that one infinity can be smaller than another (i.e. there are fewer natural numbers than there are real numbers just between zero and one).

I have learned patterns of thought.  I catch myself picking out all the contradictions and contrapositives before holding a thing in my hands.

For sixteen weeks I learned how to say that one knot is not the same as another.  Similarly, a list of disparities can define me.  And the power of discord has me sleepless.

At my best, I’ve learned that when I close my mouth I’m topologically equivalent to the Great Pyramid.

When I open it, I resemble a fish.

 

(Sarah’s note, this poem was written after my time at TCNJ, but my BA in Mathematics is showing itself; originally appeared in Sentence: a Journal of Prose Poetics No. 8)

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One Part of His Brain

 

differentiates his hand from a fork.
When a tumor overwhelms this part
he sticks his hand in his pizza.
He throws away all his belts.

When my grandmother cracked her skull open,
she said numbers and letters for weeks
until she died. These units of thought
must lie in the strongest part of the brain.
I appreciate this, but it is not beautiful.

The image of my grandfather’s belts
in a trash can also is not beautiful.

In what way can I show my grandfather
his own hand? From years of running
a wax paper company he has no fingerprints,
just like a fork, like every fork
in the whole goddamn world.

 

(Sarah’s note: this poem was written during my MA at UT Austin, later appeared in FIELD’s Spring 2011 issue)

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To read more of Sarah’s poetry and to check out her Kanye poems, please visit her website.