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      September 6, 2017SpringSara Springer

      It’s not a tender season, after all.
      Those leaves are green enough to fuck you up.
      Those winds are strong enough to tear you down.
      In spring, even the killers roam the town,
      the murderers are kicking up their heels.
      One old man with jail food in his beard
      and razor-wire lacerations like
      racing stripes all up and down his sides
      escaped his cell in thunder-stormy spring,
      made his way past houses, bushes, things
      that you and I associate with life.
      And since the spring is brutal to the old,
      the man was caught and set to rot in stone.
      Some say that he is there today, his skull
      empty but for bullets and their holes. 
      Spring is not a song you want to sing.
      Each tender morning’s shot with roadkilled squirrel,
      each setting sun’s a blood clot that the world
      coughed up and swirled back down the drain of night.
      Spring is not a season that you write
      verbatim as it’s told. You draw it tight
      like skin that dries on racks, and scrape it clean.
      You write the spring that you wish you had seen.

      from #56 - Summer 2017

      Sara Springer

      “My mental illness has made it essential for me to work through emotions and problems in words. There are little messy conversations in my head, and there are clear ones on the paper. Poetry is a way to put order, clarity, and rhythm into a world that’s very up and down, at least inside my own head. Other people’s poetry excites me when it follows the ups and downs of the poet’s world; mine excites me when it can make some part of mine clear.”

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