by Sarah Carey

Our father knows all five of us
and shows he knows:

A hand, pressed. A nod acknowledging
each daughter here at last

as animals seek shelter in the cold,
as however lost or found we feel

or felt or will, we still seek home—
surviving selves in disembodied shells.

Chronos’s hand sweeps across
the moment kidneys fail. When blood flow

to the heart slows, stops—so
matter-of-fact. This is how we terrify

at symptoms from now on: each one
in light of layered diagnoses,

prismed in the glass, reflecting
on that sterile room,

our interrupted rhythms, who will come.
We listen as the nurse says

hearing is the last to go, and cling to this
as we whisper our testimonies.

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Sarah Carey's work has appeared recently in Atlanta Review, Grist, Yemassee, UCity Review, Frontier Poetry, and elsewhere. Her book reviews of other poets' work have appeared in EcoTheo Review, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and the Los Angeles Review. Sarah's poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She is the author of two chapbooks, including Accommodations (2019) winner of the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1.

by Sarah Carey

for my father

In the latest projection, Irma creeps
up the spine of the supine peninsula.

We lie sober in our safe room,
foundation beneath us, rooted to the soil

doors and windows shut tight, radio, flashlight,
extra batteries and covered shoes at hand

so we can run from room to room
between gusts, snaps and thuds

as if we might save what we’ve built
from intrusion, elements we’ll never escape.

As the fluids left my father’s body,
he tracked my moving mouth, a salt river

smelling of seaweed and grief.
His good eye would see me through

my slips, the mopping up
I’d always do when storms swept in

then out with who we were,
so sure we’d not be hit again.

When I was as tiny as a country
seen from light years away,

he held me high above the swirling sea
that was the beginning and the end of everything.



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Sarah Carey's work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Grist, Yemassee, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. A Pushcart and Orison Anthology nominee, her new poetry chapbook, Accommodations, received the Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award and was published in June 2019. Sarah's first chapbook, The Heart Contracts, was published by Finishing Line Press in 2016. She works in communications at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com or on Twitter @SayCarey1. 

by Sarah Carey

I give her the feminine gender, this pride
on my sleeve, reflecting sensibility
and taste. Inside the gap of my scapula

she hangs, curved like a womb,
seamed strap attaching her whole body,
hip to shoulder to mine, a line—

taut at times, as when I press my hand
to the base of her sewn buckles,
feel my mother’s fingers, still at the Singer,

hem-mending after fold and chalk.
Other times she bends into my side waist
muscles, as when I sit to listen

as my mother shares her latest skin flare-up,
asks the specialist to work her in, wonders if
advancing years will cause one’s largest organ

to grow thin, or if that’s just what physicians say
to help old women make peace with pain,
or when she leans against me

for a moment, lets me feel her weight.
Bearing all I hold dear zipped, she models merits
of restraint, yet elides a sigh from deep within

her secret walls when I reach down, across,
inside her compartments to claim
my tube of lip gloss, lost key rings,

forgotten change, a pair of shades, a buried pen
grit glistens. I emerge with all my broken bits
to see that everything we carry,

mold ourselves to, wears, fades away.
I think I don’t deserve her,
but I do.

*This poem won first Honorable Mention in the “Poetry for Purses” Competition in honor of Kate Spade and suicide prevention.

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Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has also appeared in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, Carolina Quarterly, SWWIM Every Day, and elsewhere. She received an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and was a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. Accommodations (fall, 2019) received the 2018 Concrete Wolf Chapbook Award. She also is the author of a previous chapbook, The Heart Contracts (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Sarah directs communications for the University of Florida College of Veterinary Medicine, and lives in Gainesville with her husband and her exceedingly precocious black Lab.

by Sarah Carey

I live for what the dead give.

Hidden by leaf screens and branches,

I pillage rotting wood. My tribe fought

long for salvation, after the forests’ razing

dug into ragged stumps, felled trunks,

a miracle of wholeness from fragments,

a feast of insects who thrive on decay.

What’s left when I leave is for others to say.

Should you see my black wings

and red head knocking wood for nourishment,

you might ask if I believe God is dead,

as Altizer said, believing God lived and died

in Christ, that the church lied

about becoming the body—but what Altizer said

was not what most thought he meant,

which was in death, life—a spirit

indwelling to drill the dying down,

incarnate carnage, God’s passion.

If you ask me, I’m proof he was right.

If you listen to my rat-a-tat melody

echoing my drumming beak, you may hear

an answered prayer of oneness, in desire’s

shrill tattoo, and the thrumming

of your own wild heart.

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Sarah Carey is a graduate of the Florida State University creative writing program. Her work has appeared recently in Superstition Review, Valparaiso Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Glass Poetry Journal, The Christian Century, and elsewhere. She was the recipient of an International Merit Award in the Atlanta Review's 2018 International Poetry Prize competition and a finalist in Sequestrum Literary Journal's 2018 New Writer Award competition. She is the author of The Heart Contracts (Finishing Line Press, 2016). Sarah works for the University of Florida and lives in Gainesville. Visit her at SarahKCarey.com.