Sarah Passino is a poet whose writing has been supported by fellowships from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts, Rona Jaffe Foundation, Poet’s House, The Center for Book Arts, and by the 92nd Street Y’s Rachel Wetzsteon Poetry Prize. She has most recently been experimenting with washes, intimate publishing, and the old notebook as unfamiliar source material.
Excerpt from NOTE BOOK
//April, May//
A hunch of time, red berries, the trumpet of color against winter’s white fields
A soft cloth, an unfurled slogan, interpretive decisions of the wind
An art in whetting the appetite for understanding, knowing this is inside too and still there must
be an outside
Back to alchemical
Back to bull, to bear, to the bare fear cupboard
Before learning to fly, the young bird swallows the entire night sky
Before meeting the painter, you wanted her to know you understood her scraping to be rhythm and historical rhyme and blur
Blur morning, but now this high noon insistence in the narrow law of the sun
Broad dawn brace cold verb then hands held over the duraflame
Call to say se cayó el techo, se cayó el piso feel upside down in words, the super sees it through
the phone, says si
Catching thought looking at figure, catching thought looking at the figure against the ground
Circling back to annotate days later you were watching the brown greens of spring, you were watching two swallows, you were taping pieces of language to time to the windows
Currents coming both ways though the cut, a high tide, the reflection off the water off the window off the wall, the stagnant water in the basement, the dead floating things
Dependent clauses
Depending on if this was heard as a story about the destruction of a corrupt political system or a description of the rapture
Depending on whether the forty percent of Americans who believe Jesus is definitely or probably returning to earth by 2050 are in the room
Depending on whether the wolf is at the door was at the door will be at the door
Edgework between prologue and prediction saying before things after, letting an ending and a beginning warp
Facing a color of mood you count up to three hundred then cannot count higher, pale, count back down to one
Fortune tell, four corners of the wind in Tennessee, four roofers holding on to the roof for their lives, four stacked thoughts to thicken political thought, we are so lucky to be alive
Going in, going out to edge, going back and forth between devotions upon emergent occasions and death’s duel
Gong sound, inside the waves, tremble tempo going and going from you into an outside absorption, it was Tuesday
How the character rises within the fallout of some catastrophe, fell
House flower, bug-eye, looking through your nectar
If choral
If the fern through the snow a category impulse, born, again, combinatory forest color, naming life mystery again
If you serve it up
Just watching the brown greens of spring change color
Just watching two swallows fly all day, precise, sure in their language
Letting be, non-verbally
Longhand sidestep
Moving through the figure to the emphasis in abstraction, pressing hard to fault lines of subjectivity
My every circuit prepositional even standing here alone at the sink
My fingers crossed
Night, slack sense, there is no refuge in the mind, hurtle, taught and ten-eyed, blind
On the black water
On the fierce other creatures, still afterwards
Once you sat here, not moving, all day counting. Two flying things over the water, so four
Once you say principal contradiction, it's not necessarily always your principal contradiction, making rooms
Outlined in sky
Provisional bloom thought: not notch known, last dropped petal woosh
Putting side by side any two things
Putting third things. Writing in to that new sense
Speech speaking on all of our houses
Staying with this thought, online, you were all listening in to the mid-century pools around your language, hearing the shakiness in the voice, roost roost
To come back home
Time-lapse math, snap back, staccato time zone, a rolling micro wave, this velocity
We decided we would stack sentences
We decided we would stack sentences of thought
We were thinking some kind of thickening of possible political formations by way of feeling in to it might arise, from the incredible, sunk
What have you done with your side table
What have you done with the spoon
What have you done with your speech bubble speech bubble
Whether the principle social contraction could be read on the banner in the wind
Whether therefore the matter would be open, weather left to its openings and to its shapes
Words in other words, broadening your vision
You light on it
You listen to sobbing in the other room until my ribs hurt
You mackerel sky
You tendered
You wait
You wait until night
Your own ways to see in between one line at a time
