My phone promises me a gas station isthe bookstore I’m looking for. Twice.I consider a metaphor about refuelingor contents under pressure over timebut it would be a stretch. Truth is, I’m lost.
Truth is there are no maps for days like this.There is no destination. That’s a liewe feed to kids that’s worse than Santa.December sunlight like skim milk,I want to walk out into that thin bath.I want to hike six miles, maybe ten. I wantto punch someone. There’s no time.And a voice in my head—not the phone—tells me no, I’ve got this, I’m already onOakdale, just count the numbers down.
The store is in a strip mall. They sellmore merchandise than books.They do sell books. Not my books,but that book by a friend of a friendof mine on moss, on types of moss.
My friend said Mosses have a special place in my heart.It hadn’t occurred to me that a heart could havea still, green, pillowed space. I want to enterthat green, miniscule world of fronds and spores,ancient and breathing. I want to grow my own.
Sarah Sadie’s chapbook, Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes, was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015, and a full-length collection, We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds, is due out from LitFest Press spring 2016. She teaches and works with poets one on one, and hosts occasional retreats for writers and other creative types.
This poem first appeared on Tupelo Press’s website during December 2015, as part of Tupelo’s 30/30 poetry marathon fundraising project.
BMP Celebrates National Poetry Month
If “love calls us to the things of this world,” then poetry too can call us to think about challenging questions, difficult situations, and social justice, implicating and engaging the reader with the world we live in, in the hope that this engagement is a step toward wrestling with our better selves.
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