Sara Kearns is the author of the chapbook, Incisor, forthcoming from Finishing Line Press. She has been a runner-up for the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize and a finalist for the New Issues First Book Award. She teaches writing in Pittsburgh and creates polls for IMDb.

Maybe god does exist

and saw me as I played in the woods,
swinging my hair and snapping daisies at their necks.
Maybe I splashed in the swamp.
Maybe I was reckless and my eyes wild,
singing Ladybug Ladybug and galloping.
I remember stealing honey from bees.
I remember climbing sugar trees
and digging with spoons.
For just a moment, at the very beginning,
before I even recognized time,
I thought life was to be lived,
so I swung my fishtail in and out of the sea.
That is when misery found me.
And followed me through the stitched afternoons of the city.

when i open my mouth, i hear generations

My desire is ancestral, enough that it would scare you.

My mother on a mattress with four sisters,

legs dangling onto the sawdust floor,

another sister given to a relative with food.

She taught me many words for that kind of hunger:

deer tracks, bread lines, typhus, love.

Denial of love. And my father taught me this:

An Drochshaol. Black 47. A roof without a sky.

A bay window as a bed, their memories

are mine. What’s trust when there’s never enough?

I swallow whole, my hands like locks.

Take me, take me,

my hunger will let you have me.

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