Sara Gilmore
[Ocean of bleeding sparks]
Ocean of bleeding sparks
welded beautiful membrane,
I don’t know how to keep no
impression.
Ocean of particles,
red, still-closing waters: I said, I tried, lament.
And the congruence,
evacuations undone, strands of energetic Vs,
the Vs in the sky: they’re not to be lost.
Peace peace deeper in what
moves my enemies
to silence moves me to silence too.
Danger
Iridescent and matted under the feed,
carry it in the cold
and the dismantled cold, compassion happens every night and bit by bit.
Into and vatic,
fugitive, bargaining it was this, melting,
irresolute, ocean, watching and long felt; it’s in its compassion,
don’t switch, filed ceaseless, ceaselessly a fortitude, midnight reluctant
back and forth: your tapping, Lee Ann, you’re all the pollen in the night; the unusual places
that guiltily switch.
4/14/2022
[If there were an axis]
If there were an axis let it sleep, protract to where it comes close: and the funnel of water at the running
hose’s end. Where I was wrong and urgent, two or three instants can find their motion gone. Each water
and all it could carry, each committee or wideness, a vision, I was racing: I felt dying:
purpose
of understanding a single sky to go far, and no one says, no one talks.
If there were an axis let it be among, and a chain trail that can uphold every contradiction: that it can run
invisible and full, no substance after substance: return after no return.
If there were an axis it was always for you where the valve ensues, the saying water, the wideness
of your deepest home, the rattle there. Song to song to song, everything here is for you.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Sara Gilmore is the author of The Green Lives (Fonograf Editions, October 2025). Her poems and translations have appeared in The Paris Review, Ugly Duckling Presse’s Second Factory and 6x6, The Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City with her young son.