April 22, 2023

Sarah Pemberton Strong

COLD TEA

Come upon later,
like a dream recalled at lunchtime.

Dark as deep water, bone cold.
Where is she now, the woman

who poured into a white cup?
She was standing on the lip

of the whole river with her plan
when the current called her and she had to

go: answer the knocking
that she in her not-knowing

called interruption.

from Rattle #34, Winter 2010

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Sarah Pemberton Strong: “‘Cold Tea’ is my first published poem since becoming a mother, so it’s fitting that it’s a meditation on something so central to the experience of parenting: being interrupted. Though I discovered in writing the poem that being interrupted is also a reminder that I don’t know what the next moment holds in store.” (web)

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December 1, 2022

Sarah Pemberton Strong

ANESTHESIA

After the anesthesia, I didn’t know
it was after. It was not like
having slept. It was not at all
like having slept, a state you wake from

having logged some knowledge
of time’s passage: twenty minutes
feels different from two hours, or eight.

But I woke from anesthesia
asking when the anesthesia

would begin. The operation’s
over, someone said. It can’t be,

I thought, no time has passed.
I had to put my hands
over the bandage to believe it.

At home I threw up for twelve hours
what seemed like gallons
of bile mixed with darkened blood.
Try giving chips of ice, the doctor said

when my roommates called at midnight
because I couldn’t stop. Try peppermint.
How far I’d gone beyond that.

Outside my window
I was dimly aware

of something happening.
The usual midnight things
on Sixteenth and Albion in 1991:

a bartender smashing empty bottles
in a dumpster behind the corner bar, people
shooting up or turning tricks in doorways
or sleeping, dark shapes to step over later

when the sweet light of morning
filtered down through the street’s acacia trees.
I always left my car unlocked so no one
would break the windows

to get in; someone I never saw
used to climb in the back and sleep there,
leaving candy wrappers on the seat.

At last the sun came up and burned
my room to life again. It was only then

I began to feel
something was wrong—the way you’d feel
a draft of air, and looking for its source,

discover a window had been broken.
Somehow a window had been broken
while time was stopped.

Or perhaps it was the act of breaking in
that had stopped time in the first place,

the way the smashed glass
of a wristwatch
arrests the movement of its hands.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

__________

Sarah Pemberton Strong: “When I look at these two poems—‘Anesthesia’ and ‘Stalin’—placed side by side, I realize that they are both interested in the relationship between memory, consciousness, and violence. It was Joseph Stalin who said, ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’ I look to poetry to wake me up from the stupor of statistics; to help me reconnect, through empathy and close attention, with the singularity of each life—and with all life on this imperiled planet.” (web)

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December 15, 2020

Sarah P. Strong

AFTER 75 YEARS, SHE FINALLY GETS ANGRY

At first we did not know what was happening.
The tea on the porch table cooled several degrees
while she stood up, clutched
the scrollwork back of the chair. The lines
on her face arranged themselves in a way
we’d never seen, her nostrils flared
and the bird in the tree behind her stopped
singing. Someone, not me, took
a breath and then we were in it. It
was like a high wind, the way her hair
kicked up. We froze in our wrought
iron seats as from inside the house her pale
drapes sailed out toward us, toward the blackening
sky and the suddenly greenish light, toward
the fury of her gaze that was past
furious, past pale, past any flail of fear
we might fumble out, gesture.
Inside the thinly-wrinkled scent of powder a monster
had been sleeping. Her planted feet, the wings
of her hands, and when she opened the history
of her mouth her unshackled rage. It blew into us,
lodged in us, our throats, and afterward
we never spoke of it. Never, not even to one
another. Struck mute—we, who were witness.

from Rattle 29, Summer 2008

__________

Sarah P. Strong: “I am enjoying my unique status as the only pregnant plumbing contractor in Connecticut while hoping to finish my second novel, The Fainting Room, before my first baby is born. When not unclogging drains or writing, I bake and teach poetry workshops.” (web)

 

Sarah P. Strong is the guest on Rattlecast #71! Click here to watch …

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December 9, 2015

Sarah Pemberton Strong

STALIN

is the title of a book,
over seven hundred pages,
two inches thick in paperback,
that I read every word of, taking notes.
I got the only A in the class,
the professor told me later.

Twenty years have passed,
and what I remember now
is that Trotsky was killed with an ice pick
at his desk in Mexico.
Of the twenty million people
who died under Josef Stalin, I know

the manner and location of just one.
Which leaves out a lot
of bare feet slowly freezing on frozen ground,
a lot of starvation, a lot
of bodies unaccounted for
except by the meaninglessness

of a number whose actual representation
of anything is as beyond me
as the hundreds of thousands
of words I once read about Stalin.
While I am thinking this,

two naked three-year-olds run shrieking past me.
Watching the bright flash
of their limbs in watery motion,
the peeled stream of their bodies pouring
through a living room where there is no
indication there will ever be a midnight

knock on this front door, it strikes me
that two hundred or two hundred thousand
years ago, a naked child’s body playing
looked as it does now: bursting
and waving like a field when all the crops are ripe,

and also humble, a seeker of humble things: warmth,
something to drink when thirsty, tenderness—
and softly incapable of planning harm.

from Rattle #49, Fall 2015

__________

Sarah Pemberton Strong: “When I look at these two poems—‘Anesthesia’ and ‘Stalin’—placed side by side, I realize that they are both interested in the relationship between memory, consciousness, and violence. It was Joseph Stalin who said, ‘A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic.’ I look to poetry to wake me up from the stupor of statistics; to help me reconnect, through empathy and close attention, with the singularity of each life—and with all life on this imperiled planet.” (web)

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April 27, 2015

Sarah Pemberton Strong

A STORY

On the street of my childhood
a boy kept a pet boa constrictor.

The boa ate live mice, one per month.
The boy left home and left his mother

in charge of the feedings.
The mother, unaware

the boa had just eaten, dropped a second mouse
into the glass terrarium.

The boa was already full and not interested.
The mouse huddled in a corner, terrified.

After several days the mouse began to starve:
no mouse food in the terrarium.

The mother, unhappy in her role
as procurer for a snake,

kept as far away from the terrarium as possible
and did not notice

anything. Eventually
hunger grew stronger than terror

and the mouse
took a bite of the boa constrictor.

I won’t prolong this.
The bite became infected and the boa died.

Eventually the mother noticed.
When the son came back

he found the palatial glass cage
inhabited by a single mouse.

When I think about this story now,
I think most often of all the life I’ve spent

being the huddled mouse,
in such danger, I felt,

but not.
It is harder to see that I have also been the snake.

And the mother. Too many times
the mother.

But today when I thought of it,
I was the boy,

staring in amazement at a life
I would not have thought possible

had I not been there to witness,
firsthand, the blindness of the body

and the persistence of the body
and the circumstances

of the body among others,
the body that needs and needs

and forgets absolutely nothing.

from Rattle #46, Winter 2014
Rattle Poetry Prize Finalist

__________

Sarah Pemberton Strong: “The story in this poem happened just as the poem relates it, and has fascinated me ever since I was in my teens; for years afterward, I told people the mouse-bites-boa anecdote. Then last spring I found myself writing it down, at which point I began to wonder what it was about this particular story that compelled me to keep revisiting it. When I began to investigate that question, the poem appeared.” (web)

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August 26, 2013

Sarah Pemberton Strong

ANOTHER THING THAT AMAZES ME

Is how, on the rush hour subway, everyone
harbors beneath their dripping coats
a set of genitals. No one can look

anyone else in the eye, so obvious
is our nakedness under the clothes.
Though it’s only October,

there’s a blizzard dumping sleet
across Manhattan, and the streets are full
of people anyway, some wearing nothing

more than sweatshirts, their hunching shoulders
caked with fallen slush. It’s amazing
some people will stand

outside for an hour in this weather
just to see the de Kooning retrospective at the MOMA—
myself, it turns out, included.

Also that the same shade of paint
can make some people happy but give others headaches.
When I get home, I’m going to paint

my living room orange
against the six months of winter
that’s just begun. The Platonic ideal

of a raincoat is bright yellow,
and though I can’t see one beyond
all the crotches on the Lexington Avenue Local,

it’s comforting to think there will be an appearance soon,
little rite to remind us of the sun’s assured return.
It amazes me that I still want God to be more

than a perfect metaphor for loving,
that I still want to fall to my knees
for something other than this woman swaying above me,

her fingers knotted to the subway strap,
the folds of her labia just a couple inches from my mouth
while our bodies fly through a tunnel under the city,

and high above us, a deluge of gray crystal
blots out the gold of trees all down Fifth Avenue.
Amazing that the light of the sun makes us open

our eyes in the morning. And that when
there is no light, our eyes open anyway:
searching for it, then for each other.

from Rattle #38, Winter 2012

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Sarah Pemberton Stong: “This poem, ‘Another Thing That Amazes Me,’ was inspired by a trip to Manhattan in what turned out to be the worst weather I’ve ever been underdressed for. The experience, together with writing about it, invoked some of the qualities of a meditation retreat—periods of strong physical discomfort interspersed with delight and wonder at the ways we’re all connected. I read and write poetry for the same reason I maintain a spiritual practice: to experience that sense of connection to all of life. Still another thing that amazes me is that I have two books coming out this spring: one’s a novel, the other is my first poetry collection.” (web)

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August 24, 2012

Sarah Pemberton Strong

FISH TANK

My daughter has dropped two slices
of her plum into the fish tank.
The black molly, after circling around,

is nibbling at the sticker I neglected
to remove: Product of Mexico.
I’m on the phone long distance

with my teacher in England,
who suggests I might begin
each session of meditation

(Buddhist, from India) with a bit
of appreciation for my body.
Not for the cleverness

of my fingers, or the back handspring
I could turn at the distant
and limber age of thirteen.

Consider your organs,
he says; the liver, the kidneys,
the spleen, all doing their work

so perfectly together. Right now
that work is taking place
at a kitchen table in Connecticut,

where I’m watching my sweet girl
with her fish, and drinking tea
grown in the Yunnan province of China.

A China that is everywhere,
just as is—my teacher says—compassion.
And I believe him,

though mostly I forget it,
just as I forget the factories
inside me, how they work

throughout the night without pause,
becoming visible
only when something goes wrong,

as the glass wall of the fish bowl
is visible to the fish
only by the green bloom of algae

across it. Through which
my daughter’s eyes and mine
now gaze through the water at

her offering, dropped down
from another world
that is this world.

from Rattle #36, Winter 2011
Tribute to Buddhist Poets

__________

Sarah Pemberton Strong: “The poem ‘Fish Tank’ grew out of my experience of having to radically shift my definition of dharma practice. Before I became a mother, ‘practice’ meant ‘time spent in sitting meditation.’ The first few years of parenthood forced me to turn my attention to the many hours spent off the cushion as well. I have been blessed with a wonderful teacher in the Insight/Vipassana tradition, who appears in this poem—as in my life—to remind me of the wisdom of the body, and that compassion connects us all.”

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