And as the month closes
over my head like cold water,
the growing thing is already
being assigned meaning.
I have slipped through to the looking
glass world, where we talk backward
about the bombs that fall,
as if they were carrying children.
In class, I speak about the cockroach story
and the uneasy choice to put to death
something you are used to killing.
And between every sentence, grief.
So I write poems, applications, replies
to students about their depression, their bad drafts.
And it is as big as a pop rock, so
the website says, and I am angry
about the word they already use for it—
natalist propaganda, anti-choice
rhetoric—but I imagine
the small wad of tissue, bright
as red no.3, fizzing through
my wet insides. Why is it always food
they compare it to?
I am looking-glass Cronos,
and have in me a digested blip
that may reconstitute into a body
I could unswallow. I scroll through
the news of another hospital
bombing, the new babies
left to die in their incubators.
O looking glass land,
uncreated at a distance. The grief
between sentences keeps me going.
That and something the size
of a money spider, tiny good fortune
in the house. It webs in me. I put
time on my tongue
and it stings and hisses
sweetly. The months of more
of this dissolve
there: looking-glass
words, unforming down the throat.
—Sara Bluemead
Sara Bluemead (Website) is the author of Via Combusta (New American Press 2022), which received the New American Poetry Prize. They also won the 2021 Iron Horse Long Story award, and the 2024 Third Coast poetry contest. Her poems and essays have appeared in Missouri Review, Best Microfiction 2023, Gulf Coast, and New Ohio Review, among others. They live in Long Beach, CA.