SARA STRIPLING: Three Poems

STORIES

I lived in a fifth-floor walk-up,

no air, 350 square feet, a kitchenette,

a cube of cobalt bathroom.

The morning they hit,

I heard it in the shower.

I rode the bus to work.

A person joked,

but we already knew not to laugh.

The impact shook a tile loose from my shower wall.

But these might have been my neighbor’s stories.

What I won’t forget:

the men and women—white

like a new death—

walking across the bridge

away from the island of many hills,

smoke covering the clouds for over a week,

Muslims in white robes working

at the bodegas in my neighborhood

too afraid to look me in the eye,

paper that filled the sky

and looked nothing like doves.

WHEN YOU TOLD ME YOU WERE FROM SIERRA LEONE

you lifted your shirt, allowed me to see the wild geography

of scar—hieroglyphic and pulpy at your side.

You’ll go back once you’re a doctor, you say,

to build good hospitals.

I don’t say, that’s what I expect.

Instead, I lift my pant leg and show you

the small triangular scar on my knee:

yard dart, elementary school picnic, circa 1985.

KARABASAN

I feared, night after night,

the same quick, drop into sleep.

Karabasan or sleep paralysis, I’d read—

the arrival of the dark presser, my first assailer,

or—dreams too close to the surface of our waking.

My mother told me before I slept

that good thoughts made good dreams

but she didn’t know about the stealing of breath or—

this science that defied her.

What she did know?

That sleep never came easy.

That sleep should come without sweat

or threat of dream.

That sleep should unfasten

his rough, squat hands from my fledgling body.

by Sara Stripling