I have a new poem up at the Metatron Blog xoxoxoxoxoxo
I made a new Instagram account, I’d be so happy if you followed me. I am excited to make photos again/ write the light xo
@sarah_xerta
Act I, Page 4
“It’s the thirteenth day of spring and all the snow
is dirtier than it was yesterday. My teeth
are one day older and the sky
has another thousand molecules of cancer moving through it,
but my eyes have been dry,
and that feels really nice, in bed eating Oreos
like a normal person, my feet getting warm as my brain
softens and slips away from itself
like a moon, a sailboat, all the pretty things
we don’t know how to hold.
You asked me for a letter
and I sent you a star-shaped piece of my tongue.
You asked me for a letter
and this isn’t it. I’m sorry. I get so busy
thinking about you that I forget
to think about you. I imagine my insides
like a whole sea of sailboats
murmuring to each other in the dark,
and I wonder how many secrets exist on the Earth at any given moment,
what breed of flowers
will dig their roots into our graves, what shade of gold
is your breath when you dream?
You make me want to make stamps out of morning,
seal every envelope with a moan.
How many fibers of the universe have we given birth to?
Like this I am always wading through an orchestra, my hips
always brushing against some sort of glass, all these breakable
thoughts about God, the sun
in April, the sound you make when you look at me and don’t make any sound.”-Sarah Certa: “JULIET”
because there’s hair in my apartment
that didn’t come from me,
and I don’t have enough quarters to wash the sheets tonight. I drive
past the gas station and think about all the dirt
in all the countries my feet have never touched. I keep driving and wish
I could keep driving until I reach the desert, a tribe
of women who wear lipstick
everywhere except for on their lips. I want
to press my nose into their armpits, be adopted
by rage, tear like a wolf through the slow
crawl of the funeral
procession that’s been eating up my spine
for the past five years,
slice away the devil’s forked tongue
wrapped around my ankles. Has he always
been there? Because I used to be young. I used to have a family.
I used to gather myself in my arms like a wild
bunch of daisies. I used to have arms
that didn’t look like ghosts, sad bag of bones
draped with skin that doesn’t
want to be skin. I used to grow
a garden. I used to grow
a body. Now I mix tequila with limes
and call it dinner, think all my thoughts perfectly
and hope no one dumps their babies in the river tonight.
I know that things fall apart,
but this is getting ridiculous, my brain like meat
giblets, falling piece by piece down the back of my throat
so that I spend most of my days choking or
trying not to. I keep forgetting
the bright faces of my friends. I keep forgetting
to dream. I’m writing this on my laptop
which is probably giving me cancer, all that radiation
coring me out like a coal mine.
I can feel it in my belly, a green tumor with teeth and
the tongue of a man
dressed up as a better man,
so now I don’t trust anyone in a suit or
wearing a smile that makes me feel important.”
some edited excerpts from my 2015 journal & why the seemingly insignificant words we write to ourselves matter as much as anything else
cw for self-harm, suicide mentions
You are the map you wish you were born with
Civil Coping Mechanism #1
Crying. That might seem obvious, but it’s okay to cry, and you probably haven’t heard that enough. It’s okay to break under all the weight of feeling broken. It’s okay to break because they broke you. It’s okay to break because you are broke. Tears mean nothing in a capitalist system. Crying as resistance. Crying as expression. Crying as manifestation of the personhood they took when they broke you. Like you your tears are pointless. Like you your tears are infinite.
CR: Has self-censorship ever been an issue for you?
SX: Ha, I think the opposite might be my problem! I don’t know how to tell you anything but the truth.