I hate to lose you,
you, who knew
everything.
Sarah J. Sloat grew up in New Jersey, and has lived in Germany for many years, where she works for a news agency. Sarah’s poems have appeared in RHINO, Court Green, Bateau and Opium, among other publications. Her chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint, was published in 2009 by Tilt Press. She blogs at The Rain in My Purse.
On tv we saw a woman living
with her kids in a tin slum.
She showed the camera man
an open stove, a hairbrush
on a box that was her bedside table.
Along one wall, dirty water trickled
around bullet holes, ticking,
limned by the reporter’s voice-over.
How we like to focus on what’s close up.
We don’t even know where the bullets go—
through cities and forests, clean
into the open air.
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The vase is thrown
with greyish clay, sculpted
to stack like bracelets
laid to cinch near the middle.
Livestock graze the grass.
Clover sprouts unbothered.
From the hilltop, the bracelets form
the elongated neck of a Ndebele—
foreign, disembodied
in the pasture’s lap,
facing who knows
which direction.
:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::
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