Type-B Holiday
You never plan for chilly vacations, the kind
where you wake up under a thin blanket
to watch sunrise shiver through panes of glass
and drive to the nearest store to buy a long-sleeved souvenir
tee, plus a sweatshirt to pull over that, and bumble
down to the beach wearing everything you own—
pants, dress, socks, sneakers—and there’s no toe dipping,
no chasing the lap of a wave, only what you do best:
walking in one direction, pushing against the bowl-over wind,
then on the return trip letting that same gale shove you
all the way back to the thin glaze of a rental house,
where stillness collects under stilts and dries your seaweed hair
and upstairs a marble countertop waits for you to unload
pockets of loot, seashells clinking, and your stiff fingers
set to cooking lentil soup and biscuits
in full-on winter mode, cumin rising from the pot, stove
flushing the air with steam, and you forgetting
that none of this was on the agenda.
.
Lyme World
Sweat sloshes through my pores,
leaving T-shirt soggy, blood pressure
wallowing, heart in a sluggish double beat.
I touch the mark on my neck where the tick clung
and remember nausea when I yanked
it off and how my fingernails couldn’t pulverize
the pest before I flung it into the grass.
Lately the bed has a foreign texture. Cotton sheets
smell bitter, and even in Vermont
I can’t find the evergreen when I angle my nose
to the open window, just a noxious trail
that leaves a residue in the sinuses.
Mountains and wildflowers and dawn
belong to a hostile planet.
Once there was a woman who loved to camp,
who took joy in a cup of coffee.
I shiver. Between hips and back
resides a gnawing ache that throbs me awake
at three in the morning, and a silvery pain lodges
in my temples like someone has scooped at
my brain with a melon baller.
Pressed together in a fetal curl, my kneecaps
vibrate as if to say, We’re next.
Sleep is swarmed by spirochetes
flipping through blood canals and spreading
to limbs and organs, aliens
intent on taking over the host and supplanting
every speck of what’s human.
© Sarah Carleton
Sarah Carleton writes poetry, edits fiction, plays the banjo, and knits obsessively in Tampa, Florida. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including Nimrod, Tar River Poetry, Cider Press Review, ONE ART, Valparaiso, SWWIM Every Day, and New Ohio Review. Sarah’s poems have received nominations for Pushcart and Best of the Net. Her first collection, Notes from the Girl Cave, was published in 2020 by Kelsay Books.
The Loch Raven Review 