CUE FOG MACHINE 

Life should look like a dog

Sampling the wind

Obscene

In the season beauty is in the youth of 

Love hammering everything in flight 

This is all the earth records 

While I pin the cushion 

Truth is in the doom of 

The jig is upheld

The fate of clouds

A favorite subject of lakes 

POND

I come to the brim to sit 

Where water resets

And go bobbing for hush 

In the swim

Once I nursed 

In an age of forgiveness

Vegetables made me 

Into crop I return

Back then, the wheel 

Of progress turned 

My nausea

Sacrifice flowed 

Like jetstream

It was useful to move 

With the flock

The wild rose, prices rose,

Some devil seemed to rise

Now everything is going down

WESTERN BEAUTY

As soon as the play begins, I start 

planning my concessions. Over time, 

I learn to size up fruit in a glance. 

Like Agnès Varda declaring, Here is 

an apple with nothing going for it. 

And the apple? Like any natural object 

droopy with symbolic value, it reduces 

to a logo. It’s the memory that overwrites 

the event, not the event we remember. 

What rain can’t recall, a puddle will. 

Sarah Jean Grimm is the author of Soft Focus (Metatron, 2017) and the chapbook Hog Lagoon (b l u s h, 2023). She edits the small poetry press After Hours Editions and works as a literary publicist from her home in upstate New York.