Poetry | March 01, 2010
Poetry Feature: Sarah Blackman
Sarah Blackman
Featuring the poems:
-
Baucis and Philemon
-
The Event Horizon
-
Melancholia; a Fantasy
-
A Marriage Poem (featured as Poem of the Week, May 4, 2010)
-
The Distance Between the House and the Barn
A Marriage Poem
I am unmarried and do not know
how life is simplified by cruelties.
—Beckian Fritz Goldberg
It is the year
I have bartered away all my teeth.
My mouth is a lush place,
full of black usury and in return
I have a pair of new shoes,
a wheel of soft sheep’s cheese,
five of the world’s ten hottest peppers.
Where will I go, my mouth
so many wounds, that they
won’t know me by my absent bite?
How will I succor you, or the cat
we kept, or the one whose fleas
I am popping flat on my thumbnail
even as I reject her winsomeness?
Still, I don’t regret.
I am not a wife,
but maybe a window. Look
through me is the house,
is the water boiling,
a pepper slipped beneath the skin of the pie.
Look through me is the carefully arranged plate,
an eye for beauty, a terrible smile
all the worse because I mean it
so sincerely, am so happy
in these beaten hours
tapping back and forth across the boards.
If you are a student, faculty member, or staff member at an institution whose library subscribes to Project Muse, you can read this piece and the full archives of the Missouri Review for free. Check this list to see if your library is a Project Muse subscriber.
Want to read more?
Subscribe TodaySEE THE ISSUE
SUGGESTED CONTENT
Editor's Prize Winner
Apr 16 2024
6 Poems by Lance Larsen
The Poet Translates the Cryptic Text He Sent in a Fever from the Camino de Santiago Trail When I said the longest day of the year, I meant not solstice… read more
Poetry
Apr 16 2024
from “My Heart and the Nonsense,” a poem by John Okrent
from “My Heart and the Nonsense” “Oh heavens, all the lives one wants or has to lead.” —Robert Lowell, in a letter to Elizabeth Bishop I. Before I longed to… read more
Poetry
Apr 16 2024
6 Poems by Fleda Brown
Walk, I After a mile or so arthritis begins to tighten my back and I start trudging, walking to keep on walking, which is what you have to do.… read more