Sarah Stern
The Madmen
There’s always another part of the story
we don’t know. The cardinal’s red by the birdfeeder
just before the starlings scatter.
The small snow drifts mounting up
the trees. My parents’ French.
My own bold
declarations before the crowd of madmen.
It happened last night between or in a dream.
I stood up in a long dress
took a deep breath and started to speak
about the story we don’t know.
The madmen knocked on the ground
with their sticks. I waited until they stopped.
And started to speak again,
full-throated. They began beating on the ground again.
I waited, started once more, strange words
came out of me. The madmen were still,
almost for the first time.
The air nestled in on itself.
I stretched my arms out and evaporated.
Shimmering in water light,
I woke up fully flesh again—
a fish of sorts, new fins and scales,
a tail too, red mouth—
all me in this early hour.
Sarah Stern is the author of But Today Is Different (Wipf and Stock, 2014) and Another Word for Love (Finishing Line Press, 2011). Her poems have appeared in The American Dream, The Man Who Ate His Book: The Best of Ducts.org, Epiphany, Freefall, New Verse News, Verse Daily, The Woven Table Press, and previously on What Rough Beast, among other journals. She is a five-time winner of the Bronx Council on the Arts’ BRIO Poetry Award. You can see more of her work at sarahstern.me.
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