Middle Life
When I got up a deadbeetle where my back had beennot a tick, should I be gladmy blood untouchedthe body’s sliding boardI don’t understandmy tongue feeling large for my moutha loose bone floating in the footreceiving impactthis being subtle and not so subtlethis evolvingmy restless squirrelsmy own exposed waitingfor what?homocysteine: a word as pretty as gossamermeasure of inflammationI listen toa hammock filled with windand where all of it goesand in a cloaked waythere is a dark river that flowsthrough a town named Christmaswe jumped from the bridge100 times, teenagers thenbacklit and yelping.
Feature Date
- September 13, 2019
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Copyright © 2019 by Sara Michas-Martin
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Sara Michas-Martin is the author of Gray Matter, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize and nominated for a Colorado Book Award. Her essays and poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, jubilat, Kenyon Review and elsewhere. She teaches creative writing at Stanford University.
March/April 2019
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Editor
Elizabeth Scanlon
The American Poetry Review is dedicated to reaching a worldwide audience with a diverse array of the best contemporary poetry and literary prose. APR also aims to expand the audience interested in poetry and literature, and to provide authors, especially poets, with a far-reaching forum in which to present their work.
APR has continued uninterrupted publication of The American Poetry Review since 1972, and has included the work of over 1,500 writers, among whom there are nine Nobel Prize laureates and thirty-three Pulitzer Prize winners.
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