Diagnosis

The pH test for soil reveals
I’m wonderfully dark, but too acidic.
He’s the blade and I’m the thicket
that will grow back overnight, 
an otherworldly color like the Listerine
he brought and forgot in the bathroom.
What are these noises? he asked. They’re pleasure,
I wished I didn’t have to say. He looked good 
when I dressed him in my clothes, like an Italian,  
and I liked him better. I slept all night, 
as soundly as a devil in a fire. 
That we marry to drag the other's corpse 
graveward is what I think, but I 
am unmarried, so whether it is like being dogged
by an unshakeable sugar craving, 
or like walking on a drift
of hand-sewn snow, I do not know. 
I never see farther than the ends 
of the long bandages
of hope I am unwrapping.

ξ

Stockings

A girl in the park bites this big, 
yellow tomato, and it drips all over
her sundress. I think how each woman 
has a clitoris, like cochineal 
at the bottom of a cedar chest.  
When I'm rotting hungover, 
I ask myself which limbs 
I would hack off
if I had to. Under my clothes 
hides the animal, soft
as a milkweed seed that floats off 
to grow another solitary plant.
A pair of my stockings smells 
of aftershave, but no man has come 
to visit me. Perhaps a stranger 
broke in while I was out,
and standing naked in the middle
of my bed, placed those sheer
leg-shapes over his head.

ξ

Sarah Stickney's poems have appeared in journals such as Crazyhorse, Massachusetts Review, Forklift Ohio, Painted Bride Quarterly, Rhino, Bateau, B O D Y, and others. Her manuscript, Portico, was selected by Thomas Lux as 2016 winner of Emrys Press's annual chapbook competition. Her co-translations of Elisa Biagini's selected poems, The Guest in the Wood, won the Best Translated Book Award for poetry in 2014, and a more complete collection of Biagini’s translated work, To the Teeth, was published in September 2021. Stickney teaches at St. John’s College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.