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

next author >>>>>


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).