SARA WATSON

Our Corresponding and Heart-Shaped Tattoos

If you move a photo from the fridge to the junk drawer,
you will be opening the junk drawer much more often.
If you squash a lightning bug onto your skin you’ll glow in the dark.
It’s called incandescence.
You can write your name that way or you can write someone else's.
If you carve a heart into a tree
it will scar as if you'd carved it on your own chest.
I can’t put this photo in the junk drawer.
Everything I put in there gets lost.
If you wish on a coin for your love to return,
4 out of 5 times she will turn up in an unexpected body.
The fifth time, she will not return.


I Have a Headache and I Hate Everything That Happened Today

I’m so mad about so much, but I’m trying not to be.
Rage is just a feeling. It’s like when you bury yourself
in hot sand at the beach and play dead.
None of it matters. You’re alive still and the sun’s out
and next to you is a pretty girl reading a magazine.
The tide is just washing in and out like the tide.
Seagulls are making their joyful and terrible sounds.
Where you are sad there is no pretty girl, though.
No sunshine, no magazine. Where you are sad
there is only yourself in your own stupid body.
And nobody wants you. Nobody has even noticed
you are missing; nothing you left behind smells like you.
Sadness is the girl and it’s the absence of the girl.
It’s crying all day about anything. A leaf, for example, falling.

 

SARA WATSON’s poems have appeared in BOAAT, PANK, The Southern Review, and other journals. She studied poetry at Chatham University and earned a PhD in English & Comparative Literature from the University of Cincinnati. She currently lives in Pittsburgh, where she teaches Intro to Women & Gender Studies.