"The poems in Time’s Apprentice were written during the long and challenging transition from living in one region for over fifty years to living in another state, another landscape, 900 miles away. These poems ask: What does it mean to take ourselves with us wherever we go? I traveled with the heavy weight of chronic illness (which has no borders or clock and cannot be outrun) while moving on from the beloved familiar, but also from place-based trauma and relationships and belongings (both literal and physical). Time began to move in spirals, as the chronology of “normal” life events shimmered like a kaleidoscope, making and unmaking, brightening, fading, and turning again. Each poem in this collection represents a pin on a map, markers connected by sacred threads leading through the unknown— which is a place of uncertainty and not really home, but not, ultimately, a place of abandonment. "
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Sarah Stockton, MA is the Founder/Editor-in-Chief of River Mouth Review. A freelance editor and writer, Sarah is also the author of two books on spirituality, and taught at the University of San Francisco for several years. Sarah's poems have appeared in About Place Journal, EcoTheo Review, Glass Journal, Crab Creek Review, and Psaltery & Lyre, among others. Her chapbook Castaway is forthcoming from Glass Lyre Press in 2022. Sarah lives in the Pacific Northwest, by the Salish Sea.
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Guardian Angel
She’s a loudmouth bitch, heedless
and red-lipped, always running late.
She drinks a witch’s brew, polishes
the cross around her neck, drives
a cast iron cart drawn by dragons.
Smelling of pine tar and seaweed,
she lets me climb on her strong back-
pours healing waters over my head,
laughs at the story of my life.