Five Poems by Mayzie Sattler

 

How does the night take away the face of the world? 

 

The speaker thinks how wonderful it would be 

to have a cigarette, a secret pinched 

between thumb and index like a dash of salt. 

Happy to be alone with this thought, to leave it un-uttered. 

 

The speaker watches the dying light web 

her fingers into wings. Her reader hovers, 

impervious to her insistent plausible deniability. 

“I” is the strain between letters, the undoing of sight. 

 

The eyes of angels crowd the speaker’s periphery. 

She holds her breath, feeling them, then insisting 

she doesn’t feel a thing. Her hypothetical audience, 

all-knowing and querying. They are not fools, they see 

behind the curtain, the inscrutable “I”. 

 

The speaker shuts her eyes, inhales cool, unlit air. 

She wants to smoke a cigarette in a bed with a lover 

on a night like this, faces shrouded in the same blue, a halo 

hovering around their shared mischief. 

 

Orange stretches over the blue room. 

Angels in every corner listen to the speaker’s every thought 

about wings and heat and smoke. 

There is no escaping the cold “I” of morning. 

She pretends not to notice and searches for a pen.

 

 

Yarn 

 

I carry a ball of yarn within me, 

an attachment I can’t name. 

It tumbles, collects my softness. 

When it catches on my sharp edges, 

I feel its tension, wriggle 

inside myself to free it. 

I fancy its tendril crawling 

through my corridor, down to a place 

reachable by index finger and by tongue. 

Now, I tug at its viscous spine, 

coax its curled tail, this animal hair, 

twist its frayed trim 

around my thumb 

and pull. 

 

My breath possesses the beat 

of the dragging thing, coiled in it 

lessons in passing and passed down, 

from the forfeiture of girlhood. 

I’m accustomed to carrying its weight, 

warmed by my womb, softening 

and slipping from me. 

Pieces of me exit with it, 

pale vermilion wisps turn to burnt sienna, 

murky and ferocious and irresistible. 

 

Something I am supposed to abandon 

but never wanted to, this loss is shameful. 

I cramp and ache when it’s gone.

 

 

I try to sew a replica of my love’s favorite shirt 

 

I trace edges with a pin, 

stains covered with 

apology and questions 

pressed into folds. 

we will be in the same 

room tonight held too 

close, singe my arm, 

impatient with the iron. 

out of view, 

my wound bobbin 

turns with you. 

I have been careless 

with my wanting, 

I stop the fraying 

tuck the winding hem. 

you ask, so I use 

pearly thread 

poking through seas 

of cool brown. 

there will be no trace, 

a secret between 

layers of thread. have you 

been careful with 

your words? do you 

think before you reach 

for my cheek? 

shoulder and throat 

carved into cotton 

overlock the sleeves. 

my hands sprout over 

my head, careful not to 

bend and suffer pin pricks. 

blood runs to my shoulders, 

I’m not sure it’s right. 

the whir of the machine 

carries and my concentrated 

frown carry over the receiver. 

there are parts of 

myself: tunnel vision, 

perpetual worry, 

wretched desire unravelled, 

then stitched back 

into place. where is the line 

between romantic and 

ill fitting? I’ve spent weeks 

on the phone, our frontier, 

snipping loose threads, ripping 

seams. no use in scrubbing 

out the cost of time, I attach 

buttons, unfurrow my brow, 

another press, unclench my jaw.

 

 

Earth Rabbit 

 

She is a Metal Sheep put to pasture. 

She is rust in the company of pelt and hoof. 

A Metal Sheep does not sing to the rain, 

as the herd sings. The heft of her body astounds the shepherd, 

laughs back as the snap of wind. The rain trickles 

into her like secrets, tiptoes around her hinges 

and reunites with cold sopping earth. 

 

He is a Metal Rabbit under the brush. 

Others have taken kindly to his stealth, canopied 

and unflinching. There is hardly a difference between bravery 

and aluminum, all rabbits know. 

A Metal Rabbit’s patience is his body, 

gears churning dutifully across time. 

He is the colour of leaving, the keeper of this time 

trotting on, across a narrow clearing. 

 

I am an Earth Rabbit, made of my self. 

I am the cost of good luck and the crust of the clearing. 

Where I end my feet begin, never solid 

enough to leave the womb. 

The miracle of rain has come again, the mineral of my body, 

tumbling under my saturation. I sink into my self 

and hear the sounds of hooved angels singing me back 

into my birth. There are forms I will not take, 

strength I have not yet possessed. There is sulpher to my tongue.

 

 

Grief is a Furred Thing 

 

(After E.D.) 

 

Grief is a furred thing 

whimpering under the desk. 

Scruffy and matted, she pants 

and gnaws at herself, 

kicks fleas from her haunches. 

 

Grief’s dutiful companion, 

I indulge her. 

Grief follows me, untethered, 

begging to be fed. 

I fall asleep to her sighs at the corner of the bed, 

a cry escapes her sleep-locked jaw. 

 

I hear Grief before I see her: 

the scrape of claws behind the door. 

I chuck a deflated soccer ball across the grass; 

Grief sits and watches. 

 

Leisure in my step today 

when briefly delighted by my solitude. 

Grief follows me still. 

I pluck at the wiry hair 

clinging to my jacket.

Mayzie Sattler (she/her) is a poet from Upstate New York. She is a second year MFA candidate at Sarah Lawrence College, where she serves as Poetry Editor at Lumina Journal and teaches for The Writing Institute. Her poems have appeared in Coffin Bell Journal and WILDsound Writing Festival. She currently lives, works and studies in Yonkers, NY.