Stephen Sadler
Photograph by Casey Kretzmer |
|
Doubt by Stephen Sadler We were both holding back, I because I was dragged here by “she’s really wonderful, you’ll learn something about yourself...” but what I already know is that fortune is a name given to bewildering circumstance, it may as well be called ‘starling’ or ‘viaduct’. She held back meaning; I held back attentiveness. She closed her eyes, held my palm: "nothing is boring like the wind." I didn’t know if she meant boring-through or boredom. I heard "truth" and "a package wrapped in sinful black" — something like that. There were, I think they were cowbirds out the window, stumbling off the broken fence (the border of my attention), pecking the fermented pyracantha berries. At "falsely accessed" I thought she had found mania; something paranoiac — "spy, lie, unite, decry" — in my hand. I was lost in the varieties of teabags in the Jewel Tea sugar bowl. "It’s all vermillion inside, a collusion..." Her words seemed desperate, but she was smiling and calm. She took both my hands, our wrists gracelessly rolling runestones across the tablecloth. "We have such a brightness for celebrating," she declared. January 1st, 2001, was marked on her calendar ‘day one’. Noticing my notice, she said, "the centuries draw inward to contact the future." She kissed the branch between my heartline and lifeline. Like the cowbirds and the cosmos, she has made herself out of nonsense. |
 Stephen Sadler has won over a dozen coveted poetry prizes, most recently the Dorothy Tyrell Memorial prize, the Ad Schuster Memorial Citation, and the John E. Meeker prize. He has been widely published and is included in the anthology Remembering. California Poet Laureate Al Young says his poetry "contains meaning on so many different levels," and Mark Jarman says his work contains "really lovely moments of transformation." |
Kelp on the beach in Monterey by Stephen Sadler
Beach strands at Asilomar by Stephen Sadler
home | submit | subscribe
New Editorial Staff | Editors' Choice
archive | links