Augusts by Sarah Pape

Neck stretched back and tipped slightly upside

down, two weeks earlier I looked for the Perseids,

their August arrival scattered in summer’s deep

pockets. Now, warm gel glides over my throat, 

the wand echolocating textures and margins across

a horizon not unlike the one we scanned for flares, 

those long tails of light when sound leaps unbidden

from the mouth. When he says, A pinch and a burn, 

a pinch and a burn, I don’t feel the next needle but 

for some pressure and the jiggling of his hand as 

he pulls up an anchor of cells. Something familiar here, 

prone, vision fogged by the drumming pulse, neck 

flushed with something outside itself, unseen hand 

clutching at me, the unswallowable, the unwelcome, 

the inarguable body. I imagine the little smears 

of my flesh mashed across glass, stained, and launched 

into the many hands it takes to deliver myself back. 

What will they report? It’s taken so long to see 

myself with awe, to murmur and yowl over decades

of Augusts in exclamation—A rupture in the darkness!

Sarah Pape teaches English and works as the Managing Editor of Watershed Review at Chico State. Her poetry and prose has recently been published or is forthcoming in: The New York Times, New England Review, Passages North, Ecotone, Crab Orchard Review, The Pinch, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and others. Her chapbook, Ruination Atlas, was published by dancing girl press. She curates community literary programming at the 1078 Gallery and is a member of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. Check out her website for more: www.sarahpape.com.

11 April 2022