READ LOCAL SUNDAY is your glimpse into the working minds and hearts of Utah’s literary writers. 15 Bytes regularly offers works-in-progress and / or recently published work by some of the state’s most celebrated and promising writers of fiction, poetry, literary nonfiction and memoir.
Today we present Salt Lake City-based Natasha Sajé, the author of three books of poems, Red Under the Skin (Pittsburgh, 1994), Bend (Tupelo, 2004), Vivarium (Tupelo, 2014), and a poetry handbook, Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory, (Michigan, 2014). Her honors include the Robert Winner and the Alice Fay di Castagnola Awards from the Poetry Society of America, the Campbell Corner Poetry Prize, a Fulbright Scholarship to Slovenia, and a Camargo Fellowship in France. Sajé has been teaching in the low residency Vermont College of Fine Arts MFA in Writing Program since 1996, and is a professor of English at Westminster College in Salt Lake City, where she directs the Weeks Poetry Series.
So . . . curl up with your favorite cup of joe and enjoy Natasha Sajé!
a meeting
Arches National Park
here where the river flooded and wore
through Jurassic rock a channel
we reconsider empty
from Old English aemettig (at leisure)
the “p” a euphonic addition
language and leisure filled
to help us make sense of our senses
as now when in red sand with a dusting of snow
I see the print of my boots
hear the thrum of salt thousands of feet thick
smell sunlight like carbonation in the air
empty of smog replete with sharp stars
where the stream doesn’t have to be here
to be felt
will appear May 6 in the anthology: Sand and Sky: Poems from Utah (Rumi Poetry Club 10th Anniversary Publication, 2017)
frangipani
Majorca 1977
waft of citrus from the little train
globes shining from glossy dark green
room with a view
each day down a stony path
knitted olive and almond trees
bells on goats
chime of churches
buzz of honey bees
each day I walk to the tiny harbor
blue so safe it felt to swim
no one I knew
knew where I was no
keys no work no plans
what did I do with time
trudge along the hot road
without a hat nothing
to read sun rise on the boat lonely
happy to be alone
sketch of a bullfight the black pen
didn’t leave the paper
man and bull awash
yellow velvety color of frangipani
none grow here
in memory only a heavenly scent
vanilla and orange mixed
tricks the sphinx moth
tricks me
leisure as shallow as the water below
unrooted bliss
(an earlier version published in TAB: Journal of Poetry and Poetics)
palliative
from pallium
the cloak that covers the body on its way to burial
a cloth of comfort
comfort once meant strong and now
means soft and easeful
as in morphine and mouth sponges
as in care
as in acquiring at the end
the cloak
from clocca bell-shaped
as when the world was quieter
and the sound of a bell
could ring in an afterlife
I’d like to begin anticipating
my body as a sponge
filled and wrung out again and again
by pain and the will to live
palliative not from pale
as in beyond the
staked vines on a fence dividing
governable from wild
known from unknown
(published December 2016 in Under a Warm Green Linden)

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Categories: Literary Arts | READ LOCAL First