"A Jumper for Your Elephant"

by Jo-Ella Sarich

I have nothing but
these crude points, two
sisters like twins
of my fingers who were orphaned
at birth.

Working each against,
diametrically opposed, America
your arguments are like
crossfire sometimes.
I saw shards
of light cross swords through the sky once,
when the visitors crushed the home team. And I’ll
tell you this, I once

pulled my work half apart,
just for one errant stitch. It felt somehow\
manifest destiny, wax
crumbling beneath my fingers like
melting back glass sands
of the small arms trade. A spider

spins a delicate frame over the doorway.
If fear
can stick your tongue to the roof of your mouth, maybe it can
pierce skin, knit cold
like shrapnel fragments into bones. Grief is
never enough of a membrane for that.
did they stick you with indignant brass,
so that your reflection became
just dross inside another stagnant frame? I don’t need to
 

think about that, because it’s this distaff
that keeps me awake
yarn in my hands turning through each finger
back within itself.
Even language has a rhythm to it.

America, if I could
make a blanket for your night sky, a cosy
for your wayward moon, believe me,
I would. But I have only
these two needles, one in each
hand. Just enough to cover one grey hide.
Believe me, though,
when I tell you that each galaxy
also has a twin, each
drawn together by
wormholes or resonant
peggy squares or

the stuff that
lets us tell each other apart.

Jo-Ella Sarich has practised as a lawyer for a number of years, recently returning to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Cleaver Magazine, Blackmail Press, Poets Reading the News, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. https://mysticalfirenight.tumblr.com/, @jsarich_writer.

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