2 Poems by Sarah Edwards

After the Alice Neel exhibit

Once, on the roof, you made another case for the beauty
of the bus system, the civic cars wired like alarm clocks

—how, in August, a mulberry might fall to stain sidewalk
indigo like a busted socket. Half-drunk and halfway

toward happiness, it was easy to lose the thread altogether.
Handsome, you loved tasks: emergency milk

from the corner store—the route, the delay, the solution.
Jobs! Meanwhile, color studies stuck in our craw

like B-sides, meanwhile, finding ourselves spitting out
sour melon seeds, meanwhile brandishing sparklers like happy

middle fingers, sweet late summer rank drifting up,
sodden orchid, salty breeze, a slow shift of pink plastic

streamers as the neighbor child edged her bike across asphalt.
In this tenure, unswayed by anything—debt, sweat, asynchronicity,

all those looming urban canyons where you can lean down
into dark possible to call out and receive ten answers back.

High Tide

After three I make bargains Rise
and move barefoot through the kitchen
where objects take on impossible shapes

I am already homesick for this egg this spoon

In the yard the twisted fall constellations
are livid and aquatic in the sky
like wet Chrysanthemums

Across the world horses lie in deep dead piles
from the heat and nobody knows what to do
with the bodies I am not often
appropriately afraid of the right thing

The wind lassoes the rangy scent
of fallen peaches across night
and I feel almost ready to sign away
what I do want and don’t have

One can practically hear the melons growing
across the dark fields like wallpaper

One would almost settle
for paying the bills For trusting the algorithms

to find someone who basically loves
our company And within me the little
argument that laps and laps like waves

---

Sarah Edwards is a writer and editor in North Carolina with work published in Subtropics, Annulet, The Yale Review, Brink, The Stinging Fly, The Southeast Review, and Ninth Letter, among other publications.