march 2019

Sarah ChristianScher

Sarah ChristianScher (she/her) pays for her poetry habit by teaching biology at a community college. She is supported in everything by her husband Ian and her friends that should really know better by now. Wednesday nights Sarah can usually be spotted at the Two Idiots Peddling Poetry open mic in Orange, California. She has been published in Like a Girl: Perspectives on Feminism, Short Poems Ain’t Got Nobody to Love, and Dark Ink: A Poetry Anthology Inspired by Horror.

SELF PORTRAIT AS AN ABANDONED MINE

Every canary I carry inside myself has died;

scraps of sunlight on the floor of their cages.

I kill every bright, singing thing inside me.

The streams are choked with waste

and their flow has stalled;

stagnant and algal in their beds.

No one sleeps easily here.

Things grew here,

lived here,

but there are no more trees to hug the soil with their roots.

Rain cuts deep into the hillside.

Everything erodes when the storms come.

I was good, dark earth once.

Once, I believed in the natural beauty of myself.

I am clear cut.

I am strip mined.

I am dynamite crater of what I used to be.

These veins are empty,

and everything is silent.

SELF PORTRAIT OF AN ABANDONED MIME

I lay on the ground,

spread eagle.

Perhaps a rug,

or a manhole cover,

or the precursor to road kill.

Hands reach out.

Grasp at

rope,

or a baguette,

or something unmentionable;

a mime shaft, if you will.

Whatever it is,

it is immaterial;

real only to me,

as everything is anyway.

The beret rolls away;

a black tumbleweed

bouncing down the sidewalk,

dodging uncaring feet.

The white of my shirt is lane lines.

The black of my shirt is asphalt.

I am street art in its purest form.