Sara Comito

 

Dead State

Sleep is only dreamless, as once there was traffic. The land returns to the city, the fox returns to the land. I spotted her last night, tawny kits in tow, and a new small fire in the tower by the river. What fuel is there? We are down to the last books. There is one more soul left in the warehouse. We trade salt for hooch, a spirited story for a sorry song. There once was a piano. Remember when spring was a season? reads some new graffiti. You remember the stew? Rabbit and kale and white beans. Your hand on my back walking me toward a future. All that lovely olive oil before the last airplane would never fly again. The sirens screech and fail. Salvage steel and petrol. Gray ash as snow. So long ago. We need to remember to speak. We need to speak to remember. All dreams are sleepless as that last fire turns gold on the way to dying.

Nightfall

I've done all the magic I can
think of, retrieve bags already
packed, practice the re-approach

consider the slants of light
that change my name. Recalled
monstrosity as ammunition

swallowed that poison myself

Where do the notes go when
they've already been written
the melody long ago sung? How

many of us follow the curtain
pattern spiral when there's nothing
anymore to look at, just a dry husk

to swallow? This weather. I keep
falling down dunes in the dark
when I can't see the signs that say

keep off. Drift is a word that happens
forever

 

Sara Comito is the author of a new poetry collection, Bury Me in the Sky (Nixes Mate Books). A poetry editor for Bending Genres Journal, her work has recently been published in places like Drunk Monkeys, Pithead Chapel, and Ghost Parachute, and is forthcoming in the summer issue of The Night Heron Barks and the Bridging Divides anthology from Pirene's Fountain.