Sarah Sarai

The Crooked Road Without Improvement

“…among the most disturbing things to me were the long paved streets.”
Nietzsche / Jugendschriften

She is young: a fact which proves nothing.
A twelve-year old in an abode on the crooked
road without improvement: a strait winding
itself round, the asphalt roar of a cement
mixer churning, the resolve of a chute.
To offset appetites for suburban nostalgia
think: rats: scurrying: ivy’s sprinkler-ed
banks before the house, before as in:
I trembled before the hanging judge, so
trembled ivy before the squatting house.
No rats in the house squat atop the bank.
We die absolved at the end: roads, you, me.

Sarah Sarai holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College in fiction; lives in Manhattan; works as an independent editor; and loves looking at birds, rivers, and Killing Eve. Her second full-length collection, That Strapless Bra in Heaven, was published by Kelsay Books in 2019.