Fata Morgana, poem by Sarah Fox

I walk through the desert in search of something interesting.

I am so small and bright here, a living kingdom, irrigated

and stockpiled. Feelings and their forms needle

through me like plankton riding a river.

The river in me accords with twenty-first

century inventions, like the river in you.

I swallow with a good swallow.

A tall glass, living orgasm. How did I get to be

so small? I notice that the desert is deader

than other dead things. Loamier corpses

retain a bit of syrup, can be bent, will give

when pressed: more like live bodies than desert.

Or a little love shack where I might offer my cyst

to the furry comma last-gasping on the dune.

Her death is my favorite moment of our acquaintance.

I guess death leaks curriculum in accordance

with proximity. For me it's just not a biggie

anymore. I invite the dearly departing cutie-pies

to cozy up while I graze them with my cuticles

(as I liked to do with my blankie.) It’s true

that I went to the desert to pursue my mystagogy,

because Jesus said that a) he walked on

water and b) he went to the desert, so.

But this has nothing to do with Jesus ("such an asshole!")

The desert is a deadend where the head of a rabbit

joins the blood-hot sky and creases into vapors

of a throbbing heart. Brain waves. Almost edible,

like a downloaded placenta. (“That's so disgusting!”)

What I keep meaning to say is, I saw

the tracing of my very own death cry

pressed into the sand by fortune’s fingers.

It was interesting, it was worth the risk.

I knelt down to scoop it up,

but my face fell apart in my hands. 

Because Why (Amazon Link)

"Sarah Fox lives in Minneapolis with John Colburn and her daughter Nora Wynn. She has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, as well as grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Her poems and reviews have been published in Conduit, jubilat, Verse, puppyflowers, Spout, Swerve, Forklift: Ohio, Shattered Wig, Zoland Poetry, Handsome, Rain Taxi, the Boston Review, and many others. She's a teacher and a doula, co-founder of the Center for Visionary Poetics, and the publisher of Fuori Editions. She grows and loves entheogenic plants." (from Goodreads.com)

. 

"Fata Morgana" is part of a selection of poems that will appear in the first AlteredScale.com. The entire selection will be part of Sarah's next Coffee House Press publication.