Sara Sams is a poet and prose writer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She is a graduate of Davidson College (B.A.) and Arizona State University (M.F.A.). Her poems and translations have appeared in Blackbird, The Volta, Matter Monthly, The Drunken Boat, Now & Then: The Appalachian Magazine, and elsewhere. She has received fellowships to teach at the National University of Singapore and for the Ministry of Education in Logroño, Spain. Her research interests include second language writing and teaching online. She currently works as a Lecturer of English at the University of Arizona. You can find her online at saraesams.com
THE FIRST BOOK OF RITA IMOGENE
1930
There’s a cold pail by my feet
when lightning’s shucked
from roof to cow to thumb—
makes me buzz
near how licking hail does:
Now me, all quiet-like,
and the door stuck
just as pitiful to the barn,
which course starts up shaking.
What a rapturous priss of a storm
we’re in, her grand finale
as frantic as a whooping
cough, akin to engine failure,
—how when I dance
my limbs’ll tremble as they loosen,
then wilden, then let
a small bundle of intimates out
to who knows where.
Cows don’t like this. A cow
likes routine. So I make biscuits,
though what milk I have
is scorched.
It’s three months from here
my sister goes, too young
to know it. When they lower
her—sound like a cast iron
slung to the back of the rack—
the selfsame tremor
finds me. My body
hums
out after her,
through the hinge.
PROPHECY AFTER THE DEATH OF A DAUGHTER
First spiraled mint and knock-kneed peddlers,
then her small face, bright as a city not yet built.
Then the candy resting on her tongue
like a stone, the rud rud of a wagon wheel,
a particle of dust in my eye. Then three fathers’
worth of trinkets, their future value resting not
on material or use but on their distance past
so many rolling hills of time, so long
before the great unsettling. But first,
her skin stretched like a too-still pond.
Now my foot on a puddle, pushing down.
Now a burial and a hinge and me falling off.
A wife unwilling to distract herself with God,
the voice beneath the puddle.
Now the wife gone. Next, a long time on the same ground
that took my neon girl; the echo of a word
I know but never learned. Then white fungus
growing too fast beside me, as if sprouting from
my cheek. Soon, the pure white of a star and a pain
in my temple. Soon, a collective upturning
of bellies. Soon, a new museum
and, beneath the stairs, a photo of
a shadow of a boy— right where
the boy had been. Soon
a woman with pond-colored eyes
will visit, say it had to be.
Does that make this a prophecy?