Sara Grimes

Sara Grimes

Sara Grimes is from a big, creative Italian family and spends arduous amounts of time: longing for lost loves, creating chaos amongst her friends with her dramas, from her creative communities, and rebelling against technology by reveling in the natural world. In other words, she is a poet. She is receiving her MFA from UC Riverside in 2022. She has written heartfelt poetry reviews for The Coachella Review and has served as Poetry Editor there. When she is not writing, she is teaching immigrants ESL.

 
Circe

Circe, where were you when I needed to shake men
Where was your power to turn misogynists into suckling pigs?
Over land or sea, where was your light?
Over wind and rains, which heroes veered from Medea’s path in flight?

Teach me to plant discord among sailors
That darken the shore of my fortress
Teach me to insult chastity and mock shyness

Make sense of the twisted words and myths
That from my breathe and behavior wind
Like a crooked path creeping ever up the cliff
Toward the woodland park
Where nymphs and fairies embark

Summoning woman’s ecstatic electricity
To glow in dawn’s fine dew
Lending fresh breathe to the baby powder of pollen
And marigolds that carpet late summer’s down

Wake me from a tremulous sleep
Help me embrace my own forsaken ways
Over male whims

 
Players

Not in the mood for your theater
Your particular caricature of me

You flail your arms almost amorously
But stop short of any real intent

We meet each week
To pair our theatrics with cheap wine

Have I come to couch in your chagrin again?
It’s always too late and never early enough

To throttle this conversation away from pitfalls
Of plays for affection lost in translation

Your aura, your identity alludes me
And I am thrown again

Forever a loop of longing and chaos
Leaving you forever only to return again

 
Unauthorized Fires
  
Ventricles singed
By second date delayed a year

Strictly banned: another go
It’s a fire marshal fiasco

In the mood
For garish seaside banter

We make passersby cringe
You say you dabble in glass

And I was on the Island of Murano 
Tracing the lip of its Italian origins 
  
You do physical comedy
Mad rush of alt scene stories 

You flicker past me  
I want it all  

Our voices crescendo 
The swell of the sun’s warmth

The swipe of our hands
I tell you this in a fugue of phrases 

You look away but your heat rises 
I erupt in a fury of sensuality  

Logic between us is taken too far 
Words that multiply 

Stretched to abstract sums 
That don’t add up 
  
You let me in 
Determined to simmer

But it was blaze or bust 
And now this

Cherry oak
Pomegranate stand in 

For your heart 
Is charred for good 

 
Poetry in this post: © Sara Grimes
Published with the permission of Sara Grimes