Sarah Dravec

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 BouquetGone LawnPhantomSqualorly, and others.