Audrey Sachs
The Intergalactic Inside Out
They say it sounds different this time, train tracks
splitting to splinters, wooden teeth whirl-winding
to the skies, the entire enormous world yawning apart
from one minuscule particle.
The first time the universe was born, they say
it sounded like a tidal wave of mahogany pianos,
a chorus of seamstresses stitching to a ticking clock,
white satin gloves swaying in the mouth of the taxidermied
South Chinese tiger fixed above the mantle.
Each moment groaned as she merged into existence,
stretching long liquidus limbs sewn from time and crackling bones of change, and infinity,
human and inhuman desire.
The seconds blurred,
the stars oscillated up and down on the heat stroke of horizon,
laughing in chimes and pixie dust,
and from the dirt rose a single prisonous tree.
This time around, they say it sounds like tsunamis, the wail
of whole coliseums, colloquiums of liars, and psychedelic songbirds.
They say it cheats at poker, eats only celery, and lives in an old apartment in Warsaw.
They say it reads Kafka.
They say its Russian is very bad, but when it dances, the halls of Moscow dance back.
They say it could be so much worse.
They say it isn’t a saint.
They say it isn’t even sane.
They say it can only hear itself when it knows it’s dying.
SHEEP SHEEP Through the Car Window SHEEP SPARROW SHEEP
There’s a person in the water wastes,
trapped in the fields at early dawn when the grey is bitten away by flecks of iridescence glinting off the glassy surface
They’re up early
Before the shepherds run loose, the birds sweep down low, and the afternoon thunderstorms trade voices with the accordion in the house below the hill
Early enough that you can see all sorts of things:
the green dipping into blues on the horizon
And little pink and white sails swimming out to sea
Little soot insects race away atop the drowned fields with every ripple of their big yellow boots traipsing zipping lines into the water
In a puddle, a white sparrow’s skeleton shows its fine bones to the bluing sun
But the person moves by, unwilling to break their sturdy stride
Past the roots, the forest, the garden patch
The fields of water feed into marsh feed into swamp
And in the forested wetlands
Boats of leaves do float with such density
That the ground appears blanketed
In a shifting mass of green carpeting
Turn left at the island amassed in petals
And find the ten thousand-year tree
Sunken. Beneath the surface of the world
The little person kneels, laying hand to the lowest branch
While it crumbles away
With the heat of a palm
Reminding the lone messenger
Of the soil
The trails
The drowning days
Audrey Sachs is an eighteen-year-old high school student from Los Angeles under the mentorship of Brendan Constantine. She writes poetry, short stories, and novels. In her free time, she brews green tea and thinks about jellyfish. She is secretly a witch.
