At the DeCordova Museum
I’m cut loose at the sculpture garden;
the frowning busts don’t care for me
and I don’t care– I might fall
free off this embankment
or float up like helium,
puffy and unreal. You can’t touch
me up here: the art is too thick
the air is too clean.
I’m charged up like a Tesla coil
looking for my answering pair;
I’m holding colors in my mouth,
under my tongue. See
if you can find them.
Pumice Mines
The day we drove to the desert we had breakfast early and nothing
after– not water, not food, only the still dry desert air
and the Sierras crouching either near or far,
no markers to confirm their size. I was bleeding,
I was a woman, and this felt shameful
in the company of two men. I felt too much in myself
in that dry place, and hoped it was nothing worth sharing.
You drove us to the pumice mines, great quiet holes
scooped in the stone, the work abandoned to snakes and spiders,
to creatures that can wait for a mouthful of water.
I was full of love, and empty of everything.
I sat down alone on the cool floor of a mine-hole
where the white walls were too white, and the quiet
carved out my belly. As I stood up my sandal caught a burr,
and the pain was a slap. It was too much, to be a woman
in that sterile place, to be on the cusp of a life held up
in silhouette on the white walls. As we drove out
I cried for the limits of my body and my life,
and a coyote watched us go, watched us go.
Sara Eddy is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Full Mouth (Finishing Line Press, 2020) and Tell the Bees (A3 Press, 2019). Some of her poems have appeared recently or are forthcoming in Threepenny Review, Baltimore Review, and Spank the Carp. She is Assistant Director of the writing center at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in nearby Amherst with a teenager, a black cat, a white dog, and three beehives.
The Mantle 