Sarah Cook is the 2nd place prize winner of the Spring 2021 Sad Girls Club Poetry Contest
I am aiming my bow and arrow at the thing I want most
How do women always somehow kill the thing they want most?
Which poet was the poet reading
before writing the poem that wrote me?
It is a chain of reactions and listening and counterfeit
Humans pretending this is all so natural
Especially women
for whom the natural comes easy
for whom the baby comes so easily
for whom the natural hand of justice
slaps down with a spank
on my heart, mistaken as the seat of me
Thought I was funny
Until I wasn’t
Thought I was a woman
So I started over
The difficulty of containing my ambition in solitude
A room full of men alone together saying wolf, wolf,
And my clothes they un/button simultaneously
And the cellulite on my heart on my sleeve
And my mother sleeping with/in the articulation
that bears me down
that crunches me in
that dribbles my giggle
Generation not of time but agency
the ones who say stop that
and the ones who do
In disbelief,
words are bodies are mothers are might as well
Clumped together through unfashionable witness
Smaller in the garden of your turning away
History of women looking at their own circumstances
History of their thighs their bellies their overture
History of the stage being rolled in behind them
Because of the wolves and the sayers and the peaks
Because of my body and its gravity and marbling
unavailable to my mother through request or admission
unavailable through transparency of my will to be desired
or at least believed
or at least floating
above the poem
right where the poem
can do most harm
Articulation
Disbelief
Anything on a stick in my hand
The simple poem
would cut its sleeve in half
My mother is a woman
forever nodding along
My sleeve is a woman
pretending to be the most of me
as if the chunk of most of me
could accommodate a seam
Sarah Cook loves early Nora Ephron, rocks, and letting dill flower. She lives on the Oregon side of the Columbia River Gorge, where she makes money as a social worker in the mental health and housing fields. Find her recent poems and prosethings in Porkbelly Press, Porterhouse Review, Bright Lights Film Journal, Oregon Humanities Magazine, and at freelancefeminist.com.
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