Nothing to Do With Me
My debut full-length poetry collection, Nothing to Do With Me, was published by University of Hell Press and released at AWP 2015.
“An irrepressible energy fuels the poems in Sarah Xerta’s debut Nothing to Do with Me, a powerful unleashing of “all the celebration and mourning inside” the heart and its many aches. Unapologetically assertive, yet surprisingly vulnerable, Xerta’s voice makes courageous demands of the broken world to remind us that silence starves the soul, that the expression of hunger is ‘the body’s sign of hope.’” —Rigoberto González
“Sarah Xerta’s ecstatic first collection is a long deep kiss and a round-house kick to the heart. These poems have everything to do with us, with being a human being and the messy, wonderful, upsetting, sticky, mundane, extraordinary experience that being alive is. And if you are alive, if you are breathing at all, you should be reading this book.” —Matthew Dickman
Bruises
Today I am staying in my T-shirt and underwear
with so much sadness
in every ounce of my body, like being cradled
in the achy arms of the flu, and because there is nothing
else to do, I might as well climb onto the rooftop
and think about flamingoes, whose wild pink wings have been flashing
across the white sky of my brain all week for no apparent reason. I might even
light a cigarette. I might even smoke it. I might even call
the first friend I made in college, the poet
who bought me wine and kissed me on the cheek, said I looked
just like his ex-girlfriend and wouldn’t I like
to be his supermodel? Why not be his supermodel
and traipse across the tightropes of his world in six-inch stilettos with a martini in one hand
and a silk necktie in the other, wear lipstick and make movies
in the living room of his dreams? I wonder if wearing lipstick
would make me feel older. Right now I feel like a living room
that needs to be rearranged. My knees keep knocking
into my nerves, which keep tripping
over my anorexia and into
my arms. I hate that I have to keep reminding myself
that I am an adult. I hate that I don’t know
what that means. If Victoria’s Secret knew everything about sexy
they wouldn’t be selling bras. Just white T-shirts
and mango-flavored chapstick. Movies of men cooking dinner while outside
an end-of-August storm creeps over the horizon like a bruise
on your spine you didn’t know was there but like
to press up against because it makes you feel like you’ve done
something. This morning I got the mail from the mailbox
and that was something. I got a letter and that made me happy
but then I realized I had to open it
and I was sad, like tearing apart the seams
that keep a secret, when I opened the letter I thought I heard the sharp
first cry of a newborn, and so from now on I want to keep all my letters
unopened and next to my pillow forever, so that even after I die
they will always be there, the little pile of envelopes
with their little heavens breathing inside.
When I think about heaven I imagine
walking naked into the field across the street where
it’s 1968 and I’m somewhere in Canada
taking pictures of all the small white flowers licking at my ankles so I can make postcards
to send to all the people who live far away, all the people
I’m always thinking of, which is everyone,
every day. When I think about heaven I feel
the way my daughter must feel when she sees
I’ve been crying and offers me her tiny body
to hold. When I think about heaven I think maybe
I should stop thinking altogether and move through the rest of the day
like the water that makes up more than half
of our bodies, how it moves
like a moan through the dark, curving
over the lip of a cup, holding on to itself longer than seems possible,
until the break, the spill, the tiny crash of the drip
of an IV next to the bed like the one that I’m in where
my veins are really no more
or less blue than yours, all these bruises
on my body from an ocean no one has named.