Thrush Poetry Journal
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Sarah J. Sloat 

Palisades

Today I saw the blossom in the gas 
flame on the stove, burning blue: 27
trillium ribbons fed by vapor. Carissima, 

I have fallen for a whaler who believes 
bellwether is the name of a flower 
and if this is to be a week without 

shipwreck, if the sky should hide the dark 
delft cracks in the china that tend 
to multiply, then peel these petals back 

as hours. From the cliffs it’s plain, 
the world contains a dangerous ration 
of rock, the earth is overwrought 

with mansions, iron railings trellising 
round them, mad as Ahab. To perish 
or vanish is what the whalers pray 

when the will lies down like butter 
on the sea’s sunny heath. Carissima, 
my young man has no tie to land, 

his bouquet’s a humble one forced 
by any wooden horse to water. 
On the palisades, arriving ships may

bring blue weather, or if the sky puts on
a serious face I’ll nail my prayer shawl 
to the wall and say if this is to be the day.




Ceraunoscope

I’m not supposed to be shaking the sky
this early on a Thursday 

but the way things are going I might as well 
be a stampede of bulls 
or a windsock gone spastic.

The radio recommends rain but at dawn how much
I hate myself starts up the fog 

and for my sake nothing is left to be seen, 
worth being felt

and my ice cubes won’t freeze.
Fog crawls 
from the cogs of alarm clocks.

It seeps from the sockets, and drips from radio knobs, 
static inhabitant of household appliances.

Fog begins as a little cough of God, 
not willed but wily, inevitable 

as dust that won’t disappear, existing
only to be broomed from one room to another.

That’s why I quake into the furze wilds of Thursday.
I don’t need to touch fog to feel it.
It collects at the foot of my bed, yawning
at dread, siphoning 

ease from my gait.
Its glut wants to shake. I crack awake
to find it’s my job to shake it.




Self-Portrait with Lava Lamp

Here stands a gadget laughing my laugh,
a trick that mimics my breath
and soothes my inner spastic.

This flux puts its thumb to my pulse, 
the sludge that is my blood.

Here’s an idea like a cud being chewed, 
an intention that flounders 
with nothing to nail it to.

This gadget unpacks my lack of direction. 
For all its fluorescence, ambition 
caves in with a dolloping boom.

Here stands a gadget breathing my breath.
Throb of a world unstoppered 

that all day betrays how  
I’ve been crawling the halls, bulging 
with purpose and falling apart.




Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey, but has lived for many years in Germany, where she works in news. Her poems have appeared in Court Green, Hayden's Ferry Review, Juked and Linebreak. She blogs at The Rain in my Purse (http://theraininmypurse.blogspot.com)




Return to November 2012 Edition