A curve of eyeliner on each side like my sight itself was in brackets, he approached as if to examine me as if to kiss me & remind me what I owed, my heels over the edge of the porch, as above so below, leaving with clowny orange eyeshadow under lower lashes, Persephon-y, & after drinking his table wine I didn’t want I talked with the others & found refrain, a pattern, where there is expectation unfulfilled there are ghosts & often on the verge of sleep I may see phantasmic material, a salutation of cloth, so whose closet was I rummaging through in the spirit world when I stayed at a friend’s place later, to not be alone, & saw the lint of memory from bed, 1970s feathered hair, a man crouched beside me smiling & my body, which may not have been my body in that moment, on fire, the sound of phonograph static & champagne flutes & often gossip is fictionalized, though (or maybe because) it is etymologically of God, & here I almost wish a ghost into happening, to be watched by what knows me, the dead woman who saw me, gossipping from the other side of the veil about what happened to her then & now I wear color palettes from dreams for protection & I embody a fever dream, my face flooded with heat, trans sex fantasy, the difference between respect & attention & which had it been for us, in a pleasing outfit the shade of buttercream, the man still by the bed smiling, tucking his hair behind the parenthetical of his ear?
Sara Mae is a high fem writer raised on the Chesapeake Bay. They are a 2023 Big Ears Music Festival Artist Scholar, a 2022 Tin House Summer Workshops Attendee, a 2022 Open Mouth Attendee, and a 2021 Sewanee Writers’ Conference Scholar. Their work appears in or is forthcoming from FENCE, Waxwing, American Literary Review, The Offing, and elsewhere. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. They write shimmery rock music as The Noisy. They are currently an MFA Candidate at UT Knoxville and an Associate Poetry Editor for Grist.
Image: artstation.com
Check out HFR’s book catalog, publicity list, submission manager, and buy merch from our Spring store. Follow us on Instagram and YouTube. Disclosure: HFR is an affiliate of Bookshop.org and we will earn a commission if you click through and make a purchase. Sales from Bookshop.org help support independent bookstores and small presses.
Heavy Feather Review 