SARAH CERTA
Sarah Certa nació en Alemania en 1987. Es autora de la colección de poesía RED PAPER HEART (Zoo Cake Press, 2013), y su trabajo ha sido publicado o está próxima en Northwind Magazine, Narrative Magazine, BODY, H_NGM_N y en otros lugares. Vive en Minnesota, EE.UU..
Sarah Certa was born in Germany in 1987. She is the author of RED PAPER HEART (Zoo Cake Press, 2013, e-version 2014). Is a spiritual counselor & psychic channel, dedicated to providing an evolving quantum-spiritual framework through which we can more holistically understand the human psyche & dimensions of consciousness. University of Hell Press published her first book of poems Nothing to Do with Me in 2015. Her second book of poetry is forthcoming from Civil Coping Mechanisms in 2017. Follow her on Twitter @AlienHere2Love.
HOLA HOLA
Los poetas son gente de lo más vacía que conozco
es el tipo de pensamiento venido de algún lugar para darme por detrás
en el cerebro, los putos elfos lanzabolas de nieve.
Tengo humedad en los sobacos porque me he tirado toda
la mañana sola en el sofá, pensando en hilos
de palabras como perlas, en lo mucho que quisiera besar
cada clavícula del mundo.
En cuánto te echo de menos.
No puedo recordar la última vez que vi un pájaro o
que me masturbé, y ahora la mañana ha pasado y yo todavía estoy
en el sofá, con la tripa llena de pasta, mis luces de Navidad encendidas y
el corazón tan firme que lo puedo sentir en mi clítoris, esa lengua
de colibrí donde mis muslos se juntan.
¿Qué estás haciendo y por qué no soy yo?
Estoy intentando ser otra persona.
Estoy intentando sonreir más.
Estoy intentando dejar de intentar.
Estoy intentando derribar la puerta y construir un parque de algodón,
gemir más, inventar oraciones
que entren como cuentas
de rosario, píldoras sagradas en cadena.
Quiero atragantarme con algo bello
y luego escupirlo de vuelta
en la boca de extraños en la calle
para poder sentirme una buena ciudadana en mi comunidad.
Me pregunto si tendré una enfermedad.
No me preocupa tener una enfermedad.
Esto soy yo en domingo.
Hola hola soy una persona en el mundo y te amo.
Hola hola solo sé decir tonterías sobre la guerra excepto
que amo que millones de ti hayan muerto dentro de mí.
¿A dónde va todo ese esperma?
es una pregunta que me hago muy en serio, mi vagina
tiene las paredes como un cementerio,
excepto que nunca es triste. Este es el primer poema feliz
que escribo sobre la muerte, y no entiendo
mucho de cuentas bancarias o de refrigeradoras,
pero tengo de las dos y eso me basta por hoy.
-Traducción española de Tive Martínez, 2016
http://paradojasdelconserje.blogspot.com.es/
SOMEONE SAID SOMETHING ABOUT REAL LOVE
being like the roots of two trees turned
one, the inseparable connection that lives on
after all the breathlessness has burned away. After all
the pretty blossoms are gone. I think about this and my mouth
tastes like dirt. Maybe I don’t know anything about
real love, but somewhere in my hair there are birds
singing, calling you. Somewhere in the meadow of my spine
is a blooming fruit tree. Meet me there. I want
to tangle my legs with yours. I want to be breathless
with you. Let’s put our fingertips together
and read each other like Braille. My fingertips are blossoms
covering your back. My fingertips are blossoms
raining on your face. Catch them in your mouth
so that every time we kiss there’s a soft explosion
of pink blossoms sprawling from between us
like fire. Yes, this is how I want to live. Not buried
like a casket, not rooted in the same goddamn earth year
after year after year. I want to love you in Paris,
in Rome and Tibet. I want you to want me like
time, the way the planets can’t stop spinning even
if they tried. I want to be your gravitational pull. I want
to live like this, to love like this. And when I die
I want my body to be covered with ten thousand
pretty blossoms, and then burned.
MEMO
It’s been a rough month, full of funerals and dead
turtles on the road, but today the sky
is so hot and so blue that I’m finally in the mood
to invite you all over for a party, a summertime party,
where everyone is sun-kissed and brilliant, reckless, barely
wearing clothes. I’ll make fruit-and-vodka popsicles
so our mouths will be sticky and sweet like the insides
of flowers, and our laughter will bloom deep
into the night, like the summer after high school,
when a group of friends and I rented a houseboat on a lake in northern Minnesota,
and somehow we managed to smuggle enough alcohol on board
for a small army, which we were, in a way, patrolling the border
between teenager and adult, smoking cigarettes and running barefoot
through forest-studded islands at midnight, so
drunk that we didn’t feel the cuts on the bottoms of our feet
until late the next morning, and for a week it hurt to walk,
but it was a good hurt, a sweet, stinging hurt, that reminded us
of how cool were, how tough, how absolutely young and
invincible. Unlike these days, when I like to think I’m all
grown-up, sipping white wine on the patio at dusk, long-
limbed and elegant in a draping dress. I go to bed early. I do yoga.
I eat strawberries and yogurt from a big white bowl. In other words, I’m responsible
and scared. Scared to eat, scared to lose, scared to die, scared
for my daughter to grow up and leave me, for her to die before that happens, for my brother
to go to Afghanistan in November, the thought of which
is a wall cloud in my mind, threatening to hurricane my life
at any moment. But today the sky is so hot and so blue
it’s begging me to hang my anxiety in the closet, trade it in
for cut-off shorts and a bikini top, to let go and sweat
in this thick, lusty heat, the music pulsing in my chest like
blood, like the vodka in my head, and I’m ready
to feel the burn in my lungs, the ache in my legs, for something, someone
to knock me down, help me up, taste my salty skin and remind me
that I’m still here.
Down Into the Grass
It makes me sad that most of the men
I'd like to fuck are dead. And I don't even want
to fuck my ex but last night dreamed
that I did, and woke up feeling sad, feeling
fat because of all the pizza
I ate yesterday, and I can't help but wonder
if there's a malfunction inside me, some switch
I forgot to turn on, or if there even
is a switch, if I'll always
be fumbling along the cool dirt walls
of a cave, holding a white candle, thinking
about my friends, how much I love them and how much I wish
this love was enough, this green field, this gold sun, this
big sky love. I wish I were typing this
on a typewriter in the sky, or under it, I mean, that my hair
was straight and blond for a day, my nose
a little smaller, that I wouldn't have to
plug in so many things
before I could use them. I think what I'm saying
is that I'm confused. And how couldn't
I be, with all this hair on my legs, all this snow melting and talk
about guns? I want to know what it's like
to live in a place I feel comfortable
living in, to say this town
is my town, and I live here, and wouldn't you like
to come over for dinner? I keep thinking
about you coming over for dinner, looking at all
the books on my living room shelf, asking
what you can help with, since I know
you would ask, standing
in my kitchen in your bright green socks. I want to know
how those women on the porch in Montpelier
got to be so happy, drinking wine on a summer
afternoon without men, laughing
the way only women
can laugh with other women, a flock of birds
erupting from them over
and over again, how even the birds are laughing, their wings like arrows
pointing in every direction
except for back at themselves. But of course I am always
pointing back at myself, always so
concerned with what I'm doing or not
doing enough of, and this is getting
so existential, I'm so uncomfortable, it's after 1 PM
and I'm still in pajamas, riding a horse
I wish was wilder that would buck me off
and send me flailing, rudely, would hurt me, wake me
up from this stupid dream about Love
and silverware, about sleeping in a tee-pee with you, Italian
dinners in the city and day trips
to the coast in our third
summer, any summer. I want to know
what it's like to stay, to want to stay. I want to weave
scarves in my hair and pierce
my ears with peacock feathers, run my foot
along your thigh. I want to wear an apron and bake brownies, hand you a martini
when you walk through the door, put on
a black leather suit and show you
my round-house kick. I want
to make you hungry. I want
to be adored. I want to stop
wanting to be adored. I want to stop
stopping myself, slamming my fingers
in this oven door, and so I am going to stop here, on the longest
day of summer, even though you are a man
I'd like to fuck, which makes me
scared that you are dead, I am going to stop here and wear
a light blue dress made of cotton, and wait for you
to lift it like a cloud around my shoulders and push me
down into the grass the way no friend ever would.
This morning the dew on the grass was so beautiful
it made me want to write a love poem, so I could say something
about being nervous under the pink sky
of your breath, about running barefoot through the fields of the electric summer
that is you when you laugh, which I wish
could be you all the time because when I think
about you crying it feels like all the trees in the world
are turning into oceans. And I wanted to say something
about the universe inside you that I’d like
to be a part of, a place where all the beds are queensized
and covered in bright cotton sheets, where hazy
blonde mornings stretch their limbs like sleepy wild cats far
past noon and into the purple
dust of the evening that is you walking
down the street, you ordering
a sandwich, a drink, you dreaming
on the train while the cityscape climbs over
the horizon and into the sky, which your brain
has always been wider than, even
on the day you were born, which was the day
the stars shone brighter and the Amazon
river bloomed with
exotic new fish and the moon
was never so full. But I am missing the freckles, the scars, the shape
of your hands, what you like for breakfast and the food
you hate most. I am missing
the yawn of you, the stretch and the tremble, the sorrow
that lives in your pockets and all the words
you mumble in your sleep. Or maybe
you don’t even mumble, you,
who could be anyone, you
are that color I can sometimes taste
but have never seen, the one that exists only
in some ethereal fragment of my amygdala, floating
along the outer edge of my upper right peripheral, something
like sapphire and jade but also
hot pink and misty
fever grey, like the wings
of a bird from the future, where finally
you’ll find me and step into the space in my heart I’ve been carving for you all these long years.
CRAZY DAISIES
There is nothing new about my sadness, these bags
of tears in my head no heavier
than all the hearts in all
the centuries of humans before me, all the mothers
of all the sons in all
the wars, all the mothers
of all the daughters, all the daughters, all the slaves
on all the ships, all the girls
being trafficked tonight in cities
where the lights look so pretty, like adolescent stars
buzzing above underground railroads
except the train
is going backwards, or just down
into hell, dressed up
as a Mercedes, men’s words
wrapped in gold, honey, I’ll take care
of you, don’t worry, sugar, you’re getting a new life, there is nothing
new about the yelling, the voice
so big there’s no room
for you except in the corner, folded
like a balding swan
into your naked self, all the corners, all the
flowers to say I’m sorry, baby, I love you, they’re crazy
daisies, I got them
for us because we’re crazy
like that, he would say things
like that, and there’s nothing new
about how I would throw
myself back into the hot
soft dark of his mouth, like a padded
room with bars on the windows, my wrists
cuffed to the inside of his rib cage, I was
a prisoner and liked it sometimes
because it meant I was safe
from the rest of the world, all the babies
beat to death, anyone
beat to death, all the strangers
in the alleys who could never
touch me because he’d always
be there, he was always
there, in the morning, at dinner, always toasting
to me and every moment
worth knowing, all the beautiful
songs that spilled out of his mouth, I’d forget
the bombs behind his eyes, his heart, that the sun
is a bomb, how sometimes
if you’re not white it’s illegal
to want a better life or
food for your kids, how sometimes
it doesn’t matter at all what your skin color is, sometimes
people just feel like killing
other people or shooting airplanes
from the sky, and there is nothing
we can do about that
except probably kill
some more people. And I don’t want
to agree with that but lately
even the wind is quiet. The curtains
in my bedroom barely move, like ghosts
who don’t feel right
about being ghosts anymore, all the breath
they saw escape me, either moaning or
sobbing, hanging onto
the moaning, the diamonds, the gold
cashmere scarf, the poems, I held onto
the good things because isn’t that
the way to survive, to make
a marriage work, you have to sacrifice, you
have to compromise, you have to try and
try harder? Yesterday I tried
to get out of my head,
but when I got outside I saw bodies
falling like ash through the sky
except faster of course
because they’re still bodies, and this isn’t
a story, this is real
live footage of the world, yet when I
go out into the world, pumping gas and waiting
in line at the grocery store, in the waiting room
at the doctor’s office, under
the same sky as always, I never
see anyone crying, which is a phenomenon, how most people
seem to be doing okay, still believing in love and
more love, like they’ve never
been stabbed with a searing
jagged-edge rod from the inside
of their bellies to the outside and back in
again, watched their skin
be skinned and fed to them. At least
that’s how it feels
when I lie in bed and try to forget
the sky all together, try to be one
with myself in this moment in this bed, this bed, this bed
the same bed where I laughed into his chest
all November afternoon, then cried
in the middle of the night because he wanted
sex and I wasn’t wet
enough in my sleep, he said what
the fuck is wrong with you, why aren’t
you wet, don’t you love me, he said fix it, said fuck
me, I need it, he said I love you
forever, who put you
together, you’re so perfect, he would cry
about the news, he would cry
about the raping, too, and turn
to me and say, in a world
without promises, I need you
to be my promise, he said, I promise, he said, his breath
like a sweet moth against my ear, I got you, I got you.
On the Other Side of Living
It’s raining and I miss paying attention
to the trees in my throat, the skin
stretched across my hips, all the mornings
we meant to give birth to. It’s strange,
to be here again, talking to a self I was sure
I had buried. She just
won’t leave me alone. God,
I mean. I mean I’m not going to die.
What is there to bury when I
have only ever been born? What is there to mourn
when we have only ever been love?
Though it’s true I’ve been running, hooking
my ribs onto the undersides of spaceships,
slipping away between dimensions
only to find myself in the faces
of angels, my fractured mind snapped whole
in the wake of solar storms. I am
the Earth’s identity crisis, the sky
that hugs her anyway. I move
like lightning and then wonder
where all this ash comes from, why I can’t remember
ever being held as something more than a corpse.
All these stories we invent about ourselves
to keep from feeling worthy
of speaking to each other. How every word
has been both a map toward home and a wall
on the other side of living.
Pulse
I used to be a natural at mapping out my organs,
the seaweed in my veins, the metal taste of my tongue
pushed against the back of my teeth
when I ran out of ways to stop looking at you.
Where did I come from and why
is a question I used to curl up inside of
as I waited for the door in my throat
to break itself open, the daily
chore of being born. It was easy
with you. That’s what I remember most,
the breathing. The wanting to. The stop
and go of your pulse
against every barricade I’d built
around my life. You screamed
as if we were dying,
and I believe it now, all the skin
we left behind. No time
for a proper funeral when the whole world
is burning up at your heels. No time
to say good-bye when we never
got the chance to say hello. No need
to say hello when it’s home
you’re walking into. But still,
I’d like to start at the beginning, glance backwards
over my left shoulder and ease
into your vision like a cloud.
I want to make eye contact and mean it.
I want to fall from the stars back into my body
and make mornings happen
the way the sun does: steadily and only
because you exist to wake.
You light a candle
You look at Juliet’s ever-thinning legs
and think of the electric
blue neurons pulsing inside them
like the intestines of insects,
strung out and licking
against her bones, your bones, the bones
of people in Gaza, all those skulls
crushed in rubble, their brain-dead brains
oozing down into the dirt.
You shake your head. No more raping tonight.
Tonight you are thankful
Juliet is safe. You take a sleeping pill
and imagine it floating
down into your belly
like Jesus’ pinky nail.
You turn off all the lights
and lie down on the sofa, take another pill
and watch it do soft somersaults
like a baby astronaut
down behind your eyes. You close your eyes.
You see a child’s severed limb
flung across a field like a dog’s chew toy.
You see him masturbating in the bathroom
until the second pill kisses the first pill on the forehead,
barely touching, like his fingers
on the back of your neck
that first time at the airport,
you see the yellow flowers
he sent you last September
because he wasn’t okay with
you not having a sun next to your bed.
Again with the words.
You are such a slut
for men who like to get you high,
all those tabs of acid
beneath their hot tongues.
You see yourself falling
in love with this man
who hasn’t raped you,
because of course you would fall
in love with a man
who hasn’t raped you. Everybody
wants that.
Rain Poem
I’m listening to the rain smack itself into the house, and this isn’t even close
to how much I want your mouth on me tonight, how much I want
to be the cleanest water you will ever drink.
Summer is gone and I can feel the dark throat of winter starting to yawn across
the sky.
I think about myself inside this body, sitting in this bed I’ve never shared with
anyone,
while outside everything is dying and there’s a ladybug
on my ceiling who will never fall in love. My brother is sick. My daughter
is not here and if you die I’ll have to shoot myself so please
don’t make me leave my daughter.
There are so many daughters in the world and not
enough fathers. So many fathers and not
enough silk. Not enough robes. Not enough soft days where
nobody dies or talks about cancer, and so why
do I even bring it up? Sometimes I hate myself for being so sad,
but also I’m tired of these pretty pink glasses my therapist prescribed.
I’m tired of gluing all this glitter to my face, so tired
of not being naked all the time.
It’s all about perspective and no matter
how many stairs I climb I cannot see your face tonight,
so instead I’ll tell you about the Brillo pad I’ve tied to my wrist
so I can scrub away my skin cells as soon as they die
because I want to make sure you don’t ever have to touch anything less alive
than you.
Instead I’ll drink hot tea and build you a fort in my ribs, talk about all the
ordinary trees being weird in my throat. My body
forgot about darkness. My body is endless summer, knows that the sky
is so blue because you were born beneath it. My body is Easter
and she doesn’t know the word for goodbye. How much longer now
until you are inside? All week these words
have been so fucking dumb, dressing up like airplanes,
I break their wings with my teeth and still you’re alone in your apartment trying
not to drown.
This is me throwing you a lifeboat, pretending to be God, that this bright
velvet in my chest will somehow reach you like a morning in the middle of the
night.
I want to be your favorite penguin, every raincoat in the world.
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