Sara Wainscott

The Plain Simple Thing

A story of a country

mouse and a city mouse

the teacher said underline five transition words

and five words about the senses

I wanted a rug shaped like a tiger skin but did not

want to be a person who owns a tiger skin

I wanted to live under tall trees again

I wanted my children to live under tall trees

preferring a bowl of barley broth

to a gauntlet of adventures

the teacher wants your words to help you share ideas

I said and the boy said school is boring

my idea is to move away from here

landscapes in matching frames versus mirrors

in array I mused and she said in one story

John Henry dies in the other he beats the machine

I would rather not be governed

by the need for silence

opulence is a sticky comfort

resisting the tiger

becomes my guiding principle

I said I love you and he said I love you

and she said what happened to him

when his heart exploded

and want to see me climb a tree

vanity I supposed

differs from the hubris of desire

how would I teach them the right amount of fear

how sweet the cat was when he purred

The Hard Work of Going Away For a Long Time

The sky moves above the data

grid its waves

sweetly gather and disperse

like pay

when I think of the grass

and its underside

I hear how love can be

a terrain end-

less with wind and customized

to human willingness

the sky cycles through its blooms

pressing on the earth’s inch

brazen as bad policy

I think of how we separate from

our time and how nothing

is solemn nothing is

solemn halloo

to sorrow my good friend

my troublesome

dude of course sorrow

must make sense of course

solemnity must make sense

of course stories must make sense

of course the grids of faces must make sense

of course composition must make sense

of course chores must make sense

of course order must make

something of itself

I tell myself feel better

I talk to rocks

talk to the good rock children

huddled so cute and so tectonic

make rock macaroni

listen to rock macaroni music

and talk shit

about solemnity

maybe today

maybe to death

I can think outside

my mind the precedent

of loss of feeling

the pages to read again

of psalms and aphorisms

the chronosynthesis

of suffering and bliss

and I

write the task lists

carve the figures on the tablets

as constant in my veneration

as a bug all day circling

a bug-sized tractor around a bean

Yael Villafranca