Sara Wainscott
from The Star Cabins
We are on our way it takes so long
To have a baby even salmon
Know to return but when we’re back
We have this baby we leave
Notes for the neighbors to apologize in advance
For any sound we’ll do things we didn’t
Believe in before watch an animatronic
Hedgehog turn somersaults
My legs almost quit
Working in a floral guest room
The way I jiggled looked pretty good
Like a doctor says about a colonoscopy result
Ocean was a spelling word what was there
To explain it’s not like an erection
Is a centipede
Christ you’d think anyone could
Sound like David Bowie
With all this new computer bullshit
You [code entered here] you superstar
I must congratulate it was water
It was water every time it was water in the veins
I worried but couldn’t I still love I worried
By the pool reading the same book again each year
The content changed according to the place
I read it even if any original order is arbitrary
The origin of an idea becomes its working structure
An alligator sponge
Grows when you add water
If you can stand the repetition
It’s not a static thing
Disseminating information’s
Best left to spores
They travel nearly undetected in sexy
Multiplication tables their system
Rivals nerves in the muscle
Nerves in the skin nerves numb of being
Asked to send transmissions
The secret life of technology perceives
Ideas beyond language
Saturn’s not about the rings it’s what you see
Beyond the rings you must relate five tales
That most embody your experience
Experience is provisional
But I am on my way
Later write it on a Post-It Note
In a moving car the clouds appear to have
Been rolled into dumplings the small collectible dolls
Inside an elderly aunt’s case I could not touch
There the sugar goes in everything
And in the apricots
The other aunts jellied
Your scraped knee hydrogen peroxide’s
Foaming hiss count down from ten
Because the hurt
Stops when you say zero because
The hurt stops
When you say zero because the hurt stops when
You say zero because the hurt
Stops when
You say zero because the hurt stops
When you say zero because the hurt stops when you
Say zero because
The hurt stops when you say
Zero because the hurt
Stops when you say zero because
The hurt stops my
Other mouth stopped up
A blackbird came into the house
If we are hauling ass between two stars
Will the provisions keep good another month
Good woman I admonish thee regarding screen time
Has there ever been a dog more top
Here a buzzer stops a clock here a pearly room
The intestine’s inner coils are the moon’s
Bad side why be alone if you aren’t
Alone without machines
In the end my vigilance was wasted
A job for morphine the following day
I packed it into silver envelopes then thought
About that action periodically
What sleep was sealed inside away from need
From whatever you love best
From whatever forces
Pattern a landscape into lace or worse
Whatever as itself alone at times is
Dismissal at times is giving in
When you are older do not
Get bored
Sit nicely at a nice restaurant
Keep your legs under the table
Do the cameras mean I won’t need
To store an imprint
Of this moment in my mind
I’m positive that everything is great I’m fine
Remote cabins buried by the sky
A small china bowl holds the actual sky
Of the actual world there is
A dress code in a place like this
You devil I must keep my legs
Under the table do you know what the man is saying
In this song on your mouth I will say it
Slurp bone broth and do not
Say more than you should say you found
A camera in the powder room
Have one dinner have six more dinners
Heigh-ho heigh-ho into the week
You can still seem young
And gorgeous stainless fixtures
Young and gorgeous in a model kitchen
Most people your age live in tunnels
Call one a gulag but what the fuck
Do you know about it
You try to find a heart at
Golden Gardens one solid heart the waves
On waves the washed-up hearts from other years
Maybe ones the water beat back
How generous the empty waves
If you can picture them
They allow a quiet swath underneath
Where the hearts can settle down
In the pressurized tank the divers were waving
To the audience
Someone said it was sad
They were trying
To get a laugh like
Being alive in any environment
Is a possibility for some people
Think it’s normal
See America
See some peacocks
Sara Wainscott is the author of Insecurity System (Persea, 2020), winner of the 2019 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and a chapbook, Queen of the Moon (dancing girl press, 2017).