You My Tumbleweed
I have not seen anything green for a long time
I am so sick of blue
Waking up in my own blue sweat
How wonderful it will be to vomit this salt
I do not have any beach friends
Because of my incapacity for the saline
Because of my insistent gaping holes
No one wants to be inside me anymore
No one is mad at you my tumbleweed
And all your branch arms
And your inability to touch things
To fuck and love things
I do not want to be crushed today
But I have to choose a death
The water is too sad a place
This ocean is an ocean
With no ocean in it
It is an empty shell
For empty things
And you my tumbleweed are rattling around
In the dirt and the fragments of life
That will look nothing like us many years from now
Nothing like anywhere you have distributed sand
Nothing like anyone you were unable to fuck
Oh my tumbleweed I am such a sad woman
Once I knew a sadder woman
She said I have a birthmark shaped like your hometown
I have a heart I’ve been waiting
To remove for someone
Or for someone to remove
She said do you want to look
And when I looked
Guess what I could see
I Ache in All My Wild Parts
There are no conductors here anymore
Just a wailing
That I try not to identify
Sometimes a stag
Tries to hide the flash of his tail
As he fades away
And I blink hard at the madness
For varying lengths of time
When mothers come through here
I tell them inevitably
One day your son will wake up
With a welt that covers his face
Neither of you will like it
But especially him
My welts started in other places
But the idea is the same
To be wild is not what you want
Yelling for what reason
The moaning the sounds confusing
To all of us out here stripping
The wood and metal others laid
All insisting nature will have to wait
To be wild is not a dream of desire
Not touching not not wanting
Too much of all the wrong stuff
Decaying slowly into the ground
The fat snowflakes anyway and
The covering of the vibrant tissue
Baby baby she will say
Oh your suffering
And then something like
Dissolving into quiet
biography
SARAH DRAVEC is a poet in the NEOMFA. She is a poetry editor for Barn Owl Review and Whiskey Island. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Bone Bouquet, Gone Lawn, Phantom, Squalorly, and others.