SARAH BARTLETT lives in Seattle, WA. Her poetry collection, Sometimes We Walk With Our Nails Is Out, was released in 2016 by Subito Press. She is the author of two chapbooks, My Only Living Relative, published by Phantom Books in 2015, and Freud Blah Blah Blah, published by Rye House Press in 2014. She is also co-author of two collaborative chapbooks. Recent work has appeared in Eratio, PEN American Poetry Series, Poetry Daily, Lit, Boog City, Alice Blue, and elsewhere.
Lake Full Of Strangers
Horrible tusk of youth wearing down
Tusk of my mother's insides wearing down
I remember myself to you
Macaroni guts evolving
I whisper into the hole
and it feels like begging
On the road the landscape
announces itself in stages
Sweat a timetable
The light is dying
What does that really mean
if not a metaphor
In a bed somewhere
you lace yourself with dreams
like any common catastrophe
that survives by breathing
You keep arriving
A beach in winter
holding and rejecting
stone after stone
for their music