The Wardrobe's Best Dressed: Sarah Sadie's "Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes"

When French Horns Come On the Radio

Turns out I’m listening
to Vivaldi’s Duet for Two Horns
with Orchestra as I wash dishes and stack
the jovial, pot-bellied sixteenth notes,
rinse the cookpots, glad they can crash
without breaking.

He never heard the horn’s distance, how it can’t speak
intimately, as the oboe, or cello, no matter
what her husband asks. That’s its role, goddammit,
to be off in the woods, riding hard, or calling over the moors,
what it should be doing, instead of this
oompah, boom chuck, dribble dribble, rinse.

The dishwater dregs drain down and I’m ready to quit
when the radio host interrupts to say
we’ve been listening to the Ukrainian orchestra, here
in Southern Wisconsin: early
21st century Ukraine, Baroque Italy, and my Dane county,
all held in the horn’s chuckle, in these four walls.

Used to be, I would end my poem there:
the world is large, if you will open to it.
Tonight I’m tired, those staves of sixteenth notes
like fences wherever I look and Ukraine’s
in trouble. There comes a time
when the hand that usually opens in benediction
holds itself in the scalding water to keep
from slapping something.

This selection comes from Sarah Sadie’s chapbook, Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes available no from Five Oaks Press. Purchase your copy here!

Sarah Sadie’s chapbook, Do-It-Yourself Paper Airplanes was published by Five Oaks Press in 2015 and a second full length collection, We Are Traveling Through Dark at Tremendous Speeds, is due out in spring 2016 from LitFest Press. She teaches online at the Loft and in person at the University of Iowa Summer Writing Festival, and works with poets one on one. When she’s not doing those things she’s probably off seeking endarkenment or driving her kids to music lessons. Find her multimedia blog at sarahsadiesadiesarah.tumblr.com. @sarahsadie1313

Leslie LaChance edits Mixitini Matrix: A Journal of Creative Collaboration, has curated The Wardrobe for Sundress Publications and written poetry reviews for Stirring: A Literary Collection. Her poems have appeared in literary journals, and her chapbook, How She Got That Way, was published in the quartet volume Mend & Hone by Toadlily Press in 2013. She teaches literature and writing at Volunteer State Community College in Tennessee, and if she is not teaching, writing, or editing, she has probably just gone to make some more espresso.