Poetry by Sara Lefsyk

“Last night. I couldn’t feel my brain,” my stablemate
explains, “Outside, snow was inventing ghosts.

I was remembering my daughter, how she was born out of
an animal and raised up by moths.

I wake up dreaming in dark rooms and my dreams have
holes as big as the universe.

Because my daughter was born in a dream, she was lost
beneath the shadow of the sun.

When my daughter was born as a fish, she was tossed into
the nettles and birds devoured her heart.”

My stalemate said she was once fingered by her caretaker
on the moon. “When my eyes were closed and no one was
looking,” she said.

“Then, one day, every inch of my caretaker was found on
the moon. His whole mouth was swollen and stuffed full of
vegetables.”

“I was a patient with a single knife back then,” she said. “I
was the mother of a solitary fish and I was starving.”

My caseworker said she once urinated on the moon, when
she was tiny and her legs were full of bee stings.

When she turns on her fog machine, she narrates a scene
from my early childhood. The one where I vanished into a
supermarket and never found my way out.

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