Selected Poems

SARAH BROCKHAUS

Post Curfew

We climbed rooftops and I practiced
hushing, played with the distance

between in and out of myself as though I knew
something about control. The edge turned

summit, something to dare closer to, so I stared
the ground down and imagined diving over and over. We swung

at glass with a baseball bat just to hear
the shatter, it was beautiful. We made everything wrong

beautiful, like a promise to each other sleeping
in our mouths. When the glass

shimmered down our legs we laughed
at our vividity, at our tie-dyed bodies. I fell

out of so many trees, always gin-spinning
and slipping, but it still wasn’t falling enough.

SARAH BROCKHAUS

Poem for
Living Alone

This is only one thing. The ending
light shedding through, the room nearing
dark. A shiver before you’ve even grown

cold. How you’ve given yourself
up to it, how you can’t walk
away or close your eyes. You sit. And you stand. And you

sit again. You think of standing. Think so much
about motion. Make sound just to have something
to hear, like a loud noise can be a kind

of company, a decoy conversation. You don’t look
like anything. Everything is becoming
windows: the door, the screen, the bed. When

you say you want this it’s a lie, a way of wrapping
tight against yourself, of turning
see-through. You sleep always. Is anything

really sleep anymore? It doesn’t feel
like day and night, it’s turned
into nodding, rocking until you can slip

effortlessly between the two. Many
things are like this now: breathing, not breathing, alive,
not alive, love, not. Like two states of the same

organ, like a simple flex of a muscle. You’re turning
lullabic, you’re not getting anywhere. You think
you can feel your shrinking, imagine your arms

into wings until you fly out of yourself, but wings are just more
windows. The beating, another window.

Sarah Brockhaus is an MFA student at Louisiana State University. She is a co-editor of The Shore Poetry. Her work has been nominated for Best of the Net and the Pushcart Prize, and can be found in American Literary Review, The Greensboro Review, North American Review, and elsewhere.