Poem for the Time Your Girl Went into the Woods with a Shotgun Pointed at Herself

maybe it was the years

you were an orphan to me.
how songs

flew from my mouth
like rings off a candy necklace  

how I dug           and dug
in the Halloween of your heart


for something cherishable
only to find the ghost was real.



a dancer
in the ballroom of my chest

foxtrotting past every promised
trophy and regret

maybe it was the way
you polished each apology

an endless well 

agate of our youth
anniversary silver


chasing love to the depth
at which it can only survive       

to survive— 



a cathedral window       

your love a thing 

of blood sweating down her neck.
every time you lay together

made animal in the sweetheart heat


maybe it was the ultrasound
ripped from her fist like magic


with a wizard's hands               I knew too
that hot desire with you


the way it made me want to rent a car
drive to New Hampshire
and buy a sawed off arm-of-God.

the way it made me want
to walk into the forest with no shoes

and feel my head like a balloon full of lead
if only I could let a little air out

how it made me want to lay down
on the moss

and birth a spewing maul of cubs.


 I understood why she walked there in a daze
 and why you called the cops

with an entire ocean pressing down on you.
she broke

a million prisms refracting light.
how you could be

a bullet

that fit so easily in the mouth
your love a trigger

 we could never get to go off.    


by Sara Brickman

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Sara Brickman is an author, performer, and activist from Ann Arbor, MI. The 2014 Ken Warfel Fellow, and recipient of a grant from 4Culture, Sara is the winner of the third annual Split This Rock Abortion Rights poetry contest, and an Artist Trust EDGE fellow. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Bestiary, Hoarse, The New, Alight, and Courage: Daring Poems for Gutsy Girls. A teacher with Writers in the Schools and the 2013 Rain City Women of the World Slam Champion, Sara has performed her work at venues across North America. In 2010 she founded a multimedia reading series in her living room called The Hootenanny, to showcase groundbreaking writers and performers. She lives and writes in Seattle, WA, where she would love doing the robot with you.