Tag: Sara Eddy

Two Poems by Sara Eddy

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Going to Seed

I left lettuce flouncing out in container boxes
ready for picking. I was on the road, ready
for the expansion of travel. Lettuce can’t hold me.

You want a pretty big container for head-growth
and root-spread. It’s almost too on the nose: harvest
leaves from the outside to encourage inner growth.

Lettuces shouldn’t sit next to apples or bananas.
Ethylene causes rapid decay, like too much time
in the city, your feet on concrete.

Lettuce must be eaten fresh, taken as it is, demands
fealty to its moment. It will go to seed before I get back,
and I’ll toss it on the compost for the rabbits and worms.

*

Uphill

I’m driving around looking for a farm stand when my doctor calls.
You don’t know how to be alive she says, something like that.

I don’t really hear her. I’m thinking about hills, where they come from,
whether they feel us scrambling up and down. Whether all the hills

I’ve climbed add up to a mountain, and when it is I’ll be over the hill.
Everything about hills. Now she’s saying you’ve forgotten how to sleep.

I wake up 45x an hour, she says, which isn’t really sleeping at all, is it?
I feel like arguing: that’s the way I’ve always slept, and no one ever complained.

But truly it is harder now to get up these hills. Maybe she’s right,
I don’t know how to be alive. I do know that fresh vegetables

are good for poetry. Hills are good for poetry. And lying awake in bed wondering
how it has come to this, that we don’t even know how to sleep in our tired bodies.

*

Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press, and her chapbook of poems about plants, Jewelweed, is forthcoming from Finish Line Press. She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019). Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.

Have You Ever Been in a Fight? by Sara Eddy

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Have You Ever Been in a Fight?

When you date a man
one of the first things
is to find out how many fights
he’s been in, how many times
he’s put up his fists,
put his hard hands
on another man.

When they talk about this
they reveal themselves.
There are men who hate
themselves and the world.
Men who invite violence
to fall down on them.

Who take pride
in having broken
someone’s nose, who take
grim pride in having
broken someone’s nose.
There are men who see no difference
between world violence

and home violence, who know
the stages of bruise, broken
bone, concussion. They carry
weapons they’ve bought,
weapons they’ve made.
They look for weapons in the world.

What they’re telling you
is whether they can love you.

*

Sara Eddy’s full-length collection, Ordinary Fissures, was released by Kelsay Books in May 2024. She is also the author of two chapbooks (Tell the Bees, A3 Press, 2019, and Full Mouth, Finishing Line Press, 2020), and her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.