Sarah Wetzel, poet, essayist, and engineer, is the author of the collections, River Electric with Light (Red Hen Press, 2015) and Bathsheba Transatlantic (Anhinga Press, 2010), which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry. After job-hopping across Europe and the Americas, Sarah divides time between New York and Tel Aviv, Israel. She graduated from Georgia Tech in 1989, […]
I floated through this disordered life, By chance I have managed to return alive. – Du Fu I think it important to tell you that some will be barred from the journey. I think it crucial to realize not everyone can go, that we will be forced to abandon our compasses and our tattered maps, […]
This might be heaven. Above, someone is holding hands with an astronaut, light years among the space junk (exploded satellites and bits of spent rockets, wrenches dropped by the space-walkers). Schoolchildren track the debris cloud from earth. The risen say that their souls fly to the ceiling where they see, for the first time, their […]
in memory of Czeslaw Milosz The soul remembers that there is an up and that there is down. It recognizes the earth and the trees, the breadth of a Negev desert. The soul knows the delicate, the livable layer between dirt and the vast blank expanse of the universe. The soul draws the horizon. When […]
It’s possible to see and not to see it at the same moment—I’m not speaking of the way sand is no longer stone, nor about the way I bury my toes in to the suck and seethe of the edge until I can barely free myself, but how I invent water until its texture no […]
My husband, who spent two years guarding a hut on the border, dreams the same dream. In it, one of his soldiers steps from behind a barrier, begins removing his uniform. Sometimes I recognize the soldier, he says, but I never stop him as he unbuckles his Kevlar vest, unbuttons his gray green shirt and […]
They don’t have the intimate easy touches of brothers or lovers, yet their close conversation suggests they’ve known each other a long time perhaps childhood friends separated year after year after one or the other moved to London for work for a marriage that’s since ended. Now reunited over gin and vermouth, the two forty-somethings, […]
I wake, having lost track of the hours, a woman in the seat next to me weeping delicately, the thin blue current of her shoulders almost indistinguishable from the shudders of the plane. I’m not usually like this, she says, shifting eyes from mine to the window. I tell her, At times we are all […]