Poetry

Sarah Louise Kinsella photo

By

Sarah Valeika

Being Sick

Coca Cola is supposed to relax your stomach muscles,

somehow,

and so I drank it. I almost stood up

to reach my closet, where there was hanging

a flouncy fifties poodle skirt,

because that was what the women wore

in my dreams

as they sipped from icy cola bottles and clinked

their cherry sodas, legs swinging beneath them

at the front counter

where a friendly server tips his hat and knows their names,

and inquires after their fiancées,

winking at them.

I almost stood up to fetch this skirt,

to swing it around my sick hips

and pretend I wasn’t ill–

but the air turned black and I felt so woozy

I couldn’t move,

and ended up in my bed,

cola down my front,

dribbling helplessly along my chin,

and I forfeited this miniature

“American Dream.”

Going to Stop and Shop With Lewis Carroll

It is not simple.

I park the car, slam the door, and he keeps insisting

we’ve entered a new world,

that one step out of the car is a step

into Wonder(bread)land,

[which he thinks is clever

but I don’t.]

There is a list, a very adult-person,

tea-celery-beef-advil

kind of list I need to follow,

and I do not need his distractions.

We pass the muffins, which he says are

like mushroom tops, over which little fairies

flit and jump, which is when I sigh and

roll my eyes

but only so he can’t see it. I don’t want

to hurt his feelings,

poor guy, he’s just trying to appeal to

the version of me that would have shopped with

my mother, which would have been

not so long ago, in the eyes of an author

who’s been long dead.

He doesn’t know me, or rather, who I am

now, and the fact that when I say tea-celery-beef-advil,

I don’t mean jelly beans.

I really don’t,

anymore.

Sarah Valeika

Sarah Valeika is a poet whose works have been featured in Dying Dahlia Review, Poetry Breakfast, Breadcrumbs, Eunoia Review, and other journals online and in print.