Elizabeth Sackett

Art Restoration

She covered him with
tracing paper, gave him horns
that curled upwards like
the shoes of an elf, like
a smile.

She spilled flowers
from her coffee and
knitted him eyes
and a cruel mouth. She stole
them away to

mountains
bleeding yarn and
birds liver-drunk
with prisma beaks.

How can there be so many landscapes
in the stilted motions of one heart?

This is the only
stone I will carve,
she said. This is the
only button I will
sew. And so

she gave him teeth
of such precision that
when they stopped
biting, she tore them
from his mouth
and placed them in
her own.

Portrait of Winters

the snow holds dirt carefully
in the crook of its elbow.
when i’m walking my dog
at night,
i wonder what the world would sound like
if there were giants in the distance
instead of houses.
they have light feet. they eat
stars and steeples. they have intoxicated
us with this tilted-axis dirt, the cruel
portraits coffee makes when it’s through
crowing to the morning but i want
to know how to hold
onto my desires without their tongues
numbing the snugs of my nails.
winter pretends to die
every time it blinks. it kills
small parts of itself before
caressing earth into
deep wet circles. so
when you can tell me
how to nip an icicle back together
in the spring, then i’ll be content to
warm myself in a bed
that isn’t even yours.

***

Elizabeth Sackett has been published in Gandy Dancer, I Want You to See This Before I Leave, Fickle Muses, The Gravity of the Thing and Neon Literary Magazine. She earned a BA in creative writing from SUNY Geneseo and writes a lot of secret poems on post-it notes that she subsequently loses. It is her hope that archaeologists will find them one day.

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