THOUGHTS THAT BUG ME / SARAH MORRIS
I.
What delight to while a morning away
wandering along a dew-draped trail
stretching itself sturdy in the sun stripes still
freshly cracked from the chipper dawn breaking.
I feel the glory-glory-hallelujah of it all:
I stand and pledge allegiance to the birds’ roll call,
I press my feet into Earth’s generous ground,
I notice her soil
and I wonder about worms
and how it feels to stretch out on the pavement
trying to catch a break from so much rain.
I’ve raked my belly through enough dirt
to get where they’re coming from.
There have been times I could have sworn
I was made of mud more likely
than water and blood and bone.
II.
The trees tremble, graining gladly against
the breezes that were southerly sent to stir sneezes,
and I carry on, comfortably dwarfed beneath the sky
and drunk on the pollenated perfume wafting,
I dazed along and felt the ripening of the day
brightly upon my ears and neck
and then I saw a hundred
or a thousand
or a hundred thousand
ants, all synchronized and succinct
in singular purpose,
likely shifting the whole Earth
beneath my own feet,
if given the time.
I get too tired from thinking
about how much energy
it really does take
to move at all.
SARAH MORRIS / NASHVILLE, TN
As it stands, Sarah Morris has failed to leave their hometown, which is a small and common phenomenon that many people experience, but for some reason that fact threatens to confirm Sarah’s worst fears of being ultimately and unforgivably mediocre. They’ve moved from the dismal, soulless suburbs to the more central, touched-by-life suburbs, which is an ascent in its own right–closer to the city, there’s at least the inkling that there is something beyond the script of Marrying Some Good Christian Man and Starting a Family and Working At A Desk Probably and Paying Rent and Watching F*x N*ws and Being Angry and Small and Never Leaving and Never Going and Never Never Never Living and Working Too Hard While Waiting to Die. They imagine a world where wealth was redistributed and they wouldn’t have to watch Mom still go to work–where liberty meant no longer being bound to the imminent threat of death that accompanies poverty–and they could just spend their time creating to document all the embodied, sensory glory of living. But until liberation comes, they get to walk to the clanging dissonance of working for a corporation who, by design, is helping accelerate humanity towards Earth’s expiration date. So yeah, Sarah’s very good and totally fine and sincerely happy to be here.
ig: @sarahmorris_art