Poems

The Ritual Bath

By Sarah Antine

It takes a tree a year

to do what I do in a month;

The moon unfolding its pearl–

At the edge of night

I peel off

layers of myself.

Maple leaves redden and drop,

limbs shedding their temporary hands.

Full of rainwater, I go to the ritual bath,

a room between I am alone

and I am together

with you.

May no part of me stay up when I go under –

Water closes its ceiling above me.

I am no longer a container for sadness.

The Iowa Poems

By Sarah Antine

I.

Roads were all dirt and kicked up dust when you walked them. When I first saw paved roads I couldn’t believe people went home clean without the road caked into their shirts. There were fistfights over whether or not to pave the roads. Even the fields of corn swayed to one side or the other. The town got paved once everyone’s eye was boxed and swollen. Each year, I was the only kid in that house, those small and smaller towns, population 1,000, population 400, growing by itself on a stalk.

II.

We had a pig and we had chickens, and a garden. When I went to church on Sundays, and they talked about the Garden of Eden and how shameful it was that we, our relatives, Adam and Eve, left the garden, were kicked out of the garden. I thought, now why would anyone want to trek around in a garden filled with weed pulling, dirty fingernails, calloused hands and an aching back?