Interior Vs. Exterior
By Sarah M Sala
It’s #tbt! Enjoy this great one from SWWIM Every Day‘s archives!
At my worst, I control the boundaries of my form, and yet, when divine, the self permeates the physical world. It’s true: the atoms of our bodies grieve each other in death just like a color doesn’t occur alone— but takes meaning from other colors. The moon was a changeable star that ruled men’s fate. Water was green and not blue to medieval cartographers. The complexity of ocher begs the viewer to grapple with it. We are swiftly becoming an indoor species. Yet, scientists know more about outer space than the Earth’s oceans. Humans brought the natural world into their homes to combat the rise of machines. Without us knowing, trees converse via latticed fungi. Gender isn’t something one is, but does. We are a vast assembly of nerve cells— the continents longing for each other.
Sarah M Sala is the author of Devil’s Lake (Tolsun 2020), which won “Distinguished Favorite” from the Independent Press Awards. She is the founding director of Office Hours Poetry Workshop, and teaches writing at New York University. Despite the clear instructions on seed packets, she chooses to chaos garden for maximum joy. Her work appears in POETRY, BOMB, Columbia Journal, The Southampton Review, and others. See sarahmsala.com.
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Love what this teaches me about history and science and being human :)