THIS ROAD IS NO BRIGHTER THAN THE LAST FEW
I drive home so fast I drive home effacing every object in my path. Gray pedestrians. Raccoons
that haven’t even left the womb. I forget to signal left I forget about the man topless on a futon
waiting for my call. Once he stuck his foot into my mouth & dragged his toes across my gums
until I coughed up laughs like blood. We made love. Every other month he asks me delicately
why I never come. I say I’m comfortable dispensing gifts like chips sliding down the gutter of
a trustworthy machine. I don’t crave the salt the oil congealing at the bottom of my gut. Once
he brought a plastic cock ring from the CVS into our bed. I pressed a button & it quivered
unabashedly around his shaft he entered me the sound like a doll who dances when you pull
its string I laughed I laughed. This home has no sound. Before bed I ask myself if I am being
eaten who should be the tongue. How starving I am to be loved & forget that love. How late I
am for some event I cannot drive any faster than I am. Move aside fledgling raccoon! Watch
out tender man! I dig my foot into the gas I dig my foot into my mouth. I roll my window down
& a moth enters through the crack.
This selection comes from the book, If The Future Is A Fetish, available from YesYes Books. Purchase your copy here! Our curator for this selection is Kelly Lorraine Andrews.
Sarah Sgro is the author of the full-length collection If The Future Is A Fetish (YesYes Books 2019) and the chapbook Without Them I Am Still A Mother (Letter [r] Press 2017). Sgro earned her MFA in Poetry from the University of Mississippi and is pursuing her Ph.D. in English at SUNY Buffalo, where she studies waste in relation to gender and futurity. She previously served as Poetry Editor for the
Yalobusha Review and as an editorial assistant for Guernica, and she currently reads poetry submissions for Muzzle. Her work appears in BOAAT, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Offing, and other journals.
Kelly Lorraine Andrews is an assistant managing editor for the American Economic Association and an MFA graduate from the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of the chapbooks Sonnets in Which the Speaker Is on Display (Stranded Oak Press, forthcoming 2019), The Fear Archives (Two of Cups Press, 2017), My Body Is a Poem I Can’t Stop Writing (Porkbelly Press, 2017), I Want To Eat So Many Kinds of Cake With You and Mule Skinner (both out from Dancing Girl Press). Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in [PANK], Prick of the Spindle, Ninth Letter, and elsewhere. You can read more about her past and future publications and look at a slideshow of her cats at her website.
