Sara Grimes is from a big, creative Italian family and spends arduous amounts of time: longing for lost loves, creating chaos amongst her friends with her dramas, from her creative communities, and rebelling against technology by reveling in the natural world. In other words, she is a poet. She is receiving her MFA from UC Riverside in 2022. She has written heartfelt poetry reviews for The Coachella Review and has served as Poetry Editor there. When she is not writing, she is teaching immigrants ESL.
Circe, where were you when I needed to shake men
Where was your power to turn misogynists into suckling pigs?
Over land or sea, where was your light?
Over wind and rains, which heroes veered from Medea’s path in flight?
Teach me to plant discord among sailors
That darken the shore of my fortress
Teach me to insult chastity and mock shyness
Make sense of the twisted words and myths
That from my breathe and behavior wind
Like a crooked path creeping ever up the cliff
Toward the woodland park
Where nymphs and fairies embark
Summoning woman’s ecstatic electricity
To glow in dawn’s fine dew
Lending fresh breathe to the baby powder of pollen
And marigolds that carpet late summer’s down
Wake me from a tremulous sleep
Help me embrace my own forsaken ways
Over male whims
Players
Not in the mood for your theater
Your particular caricature of me
You flail your arms almost amorously
But stop short of any real intent
We meet each week
To pair our theatrics with cheap wine
Have I come to couch in your chagrin again?
It’s always too late and never early enough
To throttle this conversation away from pitfalls
Of plays for affection lost in translation
Your aura, your identity alludes me
And I am thrown again
Forever a loop of longing and chaos
Leaving you forever only to return again
Unauthorized Fires
Ventricles singed
By second date delayed a year
Strictly banned: another go
It’s a fire marshal fiasco
In the mood
For garish seaside banter
We make passersby cringe
You say you dabble in glass
And I was on the Island of Murano
Tracing the lip of its Italian origins
You do physical comedy
Mad rush of alt scene stories
You flicker past me
I want it all
Our voices crescendo
The swell of the sun’s warmth
The swipe of our hands
I tell you this in a fugue of phrases
You look away but your heat rises
I erupt in a fury of sensuality
Logic between us is taken too far
Words that multiply
Stretched to abstract sums
That don’t add up
You let me in
Determined to simmer
But it was blaze or bust
And now this
Cherry oak
Pomegranate stand in
For your heart
Is charred for good
Poetry in this post: © Sara Grimes
Published with the permission of Sara Grimes