Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 5, is now online. Yeah, you heard right…, Issue 5. We’re shifting our new volume year to begin in April starting in 2017. For now, enjoy a special BONUS issue to Volume 18 with new poems by Laura Falsetti, Sara Henning, Elizabeth Onusko, Alyssa Jewell, John A. Nieves, Hayden Saunier, Wendy Drexler, Wendy Taylor Carlisle, Alina Borger, Sarah Carleton, Allyson Jeffredo, Wendy DeGroat, Charlotte Covey, Judith Montgomery, Carmen Germain, and Christopher Citro. Stay tuned later in the month for new reviews by Jeff Whitney and Barbara L. Estrin.
Tag Archives: Sarah Carleton
Lost
by Sarah Carleton
In the night, in the wind, I search the roadside
for white feathers glued to a leather mask,
but the weeds and burrs won’t give up their secrets
and my neck hurts from looking down.
Traffic shoves a gust—
a plastic bag fills with air and floats away
and for a minute I think it’s my chiffon scarf
that disappeared in 1982.
I have reached the highway of lost things.
I’m keeping a lookout for odd screws,
rosin, milkweed fluff, embroidery needles,
senile cats, sharks’ teeth and a straw hat
that blew off at the beach twenty years ago
and could have washed up, waterlogged,
to lie in limbo among iPods, sock mates,
habits, infatuations, flight phobia and muscle tone.
When my eyes adjust to the dark, I expect
to find it all here on the berm, stuck in the prickles.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 18, Issue 5.
Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo and raises her son in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in many publications, including Houseboat, Avatar, Poetry Quarterly, Bijou, Off the Coast, Shark Reef, Wild Violet, The Binnacle, and Cider Press Review.
See all items about Sarah Carleton
Falling Hard
by Sarah Carleton
Never mind the grand green vistas,
the granite-walled highways,
the crunch of tires on a dusty dirt road.
Forget the wild blackberries lining the path,
the clumps of brown pine needles
separating each blade of grass
and don’t get attached to knobby purple hollyhocks
and fat, spotted chickens,
the clean, hot scent of queen-Anne’s lace
in the morning, the loon cry at midnight—
In just a few months, you’ll don your down booties
and hide in the house till your neighbor
plows the driveway;
you’ll watch the woodpile shrink
and calculate splits like a bank balance.
You’ll wake with your fleece cap already on,
wrap your hands around a burning ceramic mug
and think bitterly of summer, that serial enchantress.
And when the room has finally warmed up, you’ll smell
fresh cold leaking in from the edges of the window
and you’ll glance out through the glass and fall hard—
for dead weeds in refrozen snow,
for stunted skies and half-light broken by skeletal branches
and for all that artless blight.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 17, Issue 1.
Sarah Carleton writes, edits, plays music and home-schools her son in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in Houseboat, Burning Word Literary Journal, Avatar Review, Poetry Quarterly, The Bijou Poetry Review and Off the Coast.
See all items about Sarah Carleton