Tag: If The Future Is A Fetish

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: If The Future Is A Fetish by Sarah Sgro

[MY BODY DIES THE MORE I USE IT]

my body dies the more I use it
so I use it often / there a tender

death wish / terrifying entrance /
when I panic it’s from choking

on three separate tongues / mine
my lover’s & a tired history

of loss / what I use my body for
today is running & a mediocre poem

which I use for therapy / it works
temporarily / any small re-entrance

is a sign of progress / writing down
the trauma for the first time is still

trauma / writing down the trauma
for the fifth time is still trauma but


at least I have a poem in my hands /
my lover is resilient / peeling back

a sleeve she shows me ghost incisions /
slice your skin & you’re no longer

in a poem or a metaphor / you are
here with a paperclip inside your wrist /

does the past decay the more I use it
in a poem / can I out-poem the past

from churning in my belly-pit / yes
the future is an enzyme & a catalyst

or a burp that smells like hotdogs
& a little like my grief / I hate that

stupid constant place which refuses
tense / longing too / greedily I suck

my lover’s upper lip looking for a poem
or I lick the balmy archive of my gut

with all three tongues / one says loss
one says loss one says I am not your tongue

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.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: If The Future Is A Fetish by Sarah Sgro

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.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: If The Future Is A Fetish by Sarah Sgro

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.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: If The Future Is A Fetish by Sarah Sgro

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.

 

The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: If The Future Is A Fetish by Sarah Sgro

BODY AS A PLANT EXPANDING

Everyone’s baring fangs that I don’t have. These teeth inverted like a yawn inside the womb,
breath aerating supple gums. Look how sleek my throat & tongue. Who does not love wet pink
skin, fragrant innards of a pork chop, all these fragrant innards that I offer up. Yes I love the
violence of flesh the word connoting something gnawed but I no longer want to be a monster.
Just today I hated everything with foolish rage & simply jumped in place admiring the symmetry
of springing breasts. Listen I have tried my hardest to be gruesome. Consumed the romance
of what’s decomposed. Clogged my toilet & saved photos of the bowl brimming tall with piss,
bundled webs of brown cloth, every piece of me you’ve never seen. Dreamt about my fingernails
decaying dreamt about my stomach dredged in egg wash & filleted. It’s hard to be aroused
by anything but dirt. Disfiguring my own frame. When I first came in tenth grade my boyfriend
laughed like yes I should feel gross shame. All he did was rub his leg against the wishbone of
my jeans & I trembled like a baby deer. I closed my eyes & wished to be a spear, something
that could pierce. I loved my filth like a weapon. I thought that I could scream instead of come.
I feared my skin would not even stick a finger in. Forget about what I have soiled, every dream
of being cast in mud. I am donning tiny shorts, slick & luscious like a seal. Sculpting my butt like
sculpting my world. Shaving every vagrant hair. It’s easier to touch myself when I am soft. My
soul like fur my pussy furless. Sometimes when I’m almost there I still feel ill, tiny pulses pulling
me apart. I swear I want to bloom. Watch me posing wildly in my bedroom mirror. Singing into
every abyss sighing open like a fucking flower. Every pore an orifice & light flooding through.
I’m opening I’m opening I’m opening for you.

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.