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dancing girl press, 2013
$7.00 |
Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey. After finishing graduate school with a degree in language education, she taught in China for a year cut short by the Tiananmen Square massacre. Afterwards, she rambled around, and has since lived in California, Kansas and Italy. For the past couple decades she’s lived in Germany, where she works in Weltschmerz. Sarah’s poems have appeared in Bateau, Harper’s Ferry Review and Court Green. Her chapbook, “Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair,” was published by DGP in 2011, and another, “Homebodies,” was put out by Hyacinth Girl Press in 2012.
The Russians Go With Everything
I tend a long shelf of them because they go
with spring as well as winter
when the Kremlin cuts the power
and one must read by snowlight.
I wear a dark one on my arm to work;
I clutch another like a purse whenever
I set out to do some serious rambling.
I hate it when some readers say
the cold is like a character, when a character
wants soul, and should not lack volition.
The dwarf spruce of the tundra need so little
to live, nothing in fact
and thus they may crop up all over the globe
like a rash of fur caps, like a world
of people who wouldn’t mind dying
in train stations
as long as one has good shoes
and Christmas has passed,
as long as the stationmaster has a knack
for the tragic, and one runs no real chance
of getting arrested.
***