Poetry by Sarah Scarcliff

Sarah Scarcliff is an MFA candidate studying poetry at Arizona State University and serving as nonfiction editor for Hayden's Ferry Review. She is the author of the children's book, Pitanga, a story about frogs, deforestation, and what humans can do to mitigate the effects of climate change. Her work can be found in Spectrum Literary Journal, Obindo Magazine, and MSU Roadrunner Review. She is from Birmingham, Alabama.

Rain

Dreaming back in Alabama and my grandma has a house
again, a yard. Virgilesque she moves quickly, names
her flowers as we pass. Gardenia, camelia, hydrangea
hydrangea hydrangea. Marching the kudzu eventually
hides her and I wait on the asphalt, my legs will not go on
unguided. Count sweat pricks, waterbreath like breathing
through a swimming pool. Palm my humid hair past
my eyes. The wet sun adores me like The Lord and down
with that light comes a bird, one I've never seen before.
Close, close, so close to me! I am a trustworthy being, must be.
As I take mental recordings of its features—head a black circle,
band of white neck, little body brown, binocular bulbs brown too,
eyes brown too?—it opens its small beak and in its mouth shines an eye.
This is a bird looking at me head-on.
This is an animal separate from the animal of myself surprising me.
This is wanting guidance so bad I start to see it everywhere.4

Womanmade Hard Side

I don't want to hear from you about a sundress
or that you're partial to watermelon shampoo
or about the geological hips
who rocked you as a baby
as you swayed forward onto her dazzling gulf fingertips.

Don't try me at lace, not my long hair swooping,
not the fine netting of a peach and not any pattern you've seen before
in whose writ is naming.

Don't bring up woods, no nymphy sempervirens,
no sparkling silences to dreamy final shelters where a tiny fire
could lead and keep your ass home.

Never glorious boulders and, lord, no diamonds.
Can your rocks and shiny things.

No ice, no hot cool so opposite yourself
humming in a hundred low tones your license.

And do not talk to me about old sea witchery.
I am not patient for you figuring my habits
are ilk of what you rode here on.
I do not split your bones between jarred and donned.

I am cement.