Three Poems

Transit

Night rabbits steal the scene,
a flurried effigy, a shadowed flight.

Each street absorbed into stealth,
into shapes that leak beneath trees:

Specificity is the thing.

It’s a Tuesday to walk off a little piece
of heartache. Not large. Not quiet,

either. Wind stirs clouds gone wispy,
gone egg white. The dog chases the rabbit.

The rabbit chases the mineral forms
swelling beneath the loamy surface.

In the yard, a black umbrella shocks open,
startles nothing into something.

On a good day, its opposite follows
—whatever is behind is almost there.

Heat Wave

Lapses of light and shadow go hotfoot
through the house

Bad gin at the roof of the mouth Dogs twitching
gone jogging Legs up in sleep

All August this sweet slippage airless like relief
Like going to bed every night with wet hair

and waking up dry Like the slow wrist work
of rinsing the trees of peaches

Like the rangy old man who snaked the path
toward us talking of overpopulation

I don’t remember earmarking those pages Nor
not sleeping all summer I don’t remember

setting out the dish of milk though in the viscous
blister, six-thirty, it is there This is the effort

of naming things Urging vowels to claim
their counterparts Not to solve but not to commit

to any particulars of suffering either To say
I saw this To say I know that it was there

Charlotte

Green warp of vines, hand over hand,
shadowed gulch, swallowed glare

All the houses with stairs and doors
that (seemed to) lead nowhere—

Imagine being this legible to one another,
imagine through
the bodily fog, a cellular twang: flinty non-rot

which moves through the system like vinegar,
like memories of rock and roll

And all that’s needed is a little night vision
—candled, tidal, able with new clarity
to be met & met & met again: hands

and feet swarming with moss, mouth
rapid to light as a moth
my moss my mouth moth mouth

∩

Sarah Edwards is a writer and editor in Durham, North Carolina. She has fiction and poetry published in Subtropics, The Stinging Fly, Ninth Letter, Annulet, Joyland, The Southern Humanities Review, and The Yale Review, among other places.