Poetry By Sara Eddy

Nic McPhee CC



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I Had a Charmed Childhood and I’ll Never Recover From It

Seriously, you should pity me. Life will never be as good as tick-free fields, 
books on blankets in the yard, mom’s lemonade from a piney kitchen.

Pond-swimming, river-canoeing, pavement still sun-warm at night.  
Lucky Charms, tomatoes from the vine, watermelon seeds in the grass. 

My friends were smart and equally charmed with professor parents 
and not too much money. Spring peepers, cicadas, chickadees. 

We rode on each other’s handlebars.  It feels like I’m forgetting some things, 
important things about Depression, and alcohol, how your friends’ parents 

can get suddenly terrifying. Calling my dad to get me from a sleepover 
in the middle of the night. Diet culture, frozen foods, Ronald Reagan, 

AIDS, Dukes of Hazzard. My dad waking up screaming in the middle of the night. 
Kids who just disappeared, or who died in plain sight, trying to twist themselves out 

of who they loved. Parents who stayed together, no matter what. No one 
was watching us, and no one was watching us.  O, Life will never be like that again.

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Tits Up

When this all goes tits up,
100% nipples to the sky–
boiling oceans and shrinking
land mass–I’m going to miss
pizza joints. I’m gonna
fuckin pine for streaming
services, check engine lights,
DMV wait-times, 
the hassle of air travel.
Slow internet and soft serve.
You can’t even imagine
what we’re going to lose.
When I’m Little-House-in-the
Burning-Woods trading scraps
of old t-shirts for my neighbor’s 
candle stumps I’ll be thinking 
of long drives up into the hills.
I will never get over the loss
of Joni Mitchell’s Blue or
the smell of gasoline.
All I want for now is to live out
my days in the squalor
of puppuccinos, zoom calls, 
gently impending doom,
& pretend it's not all spiraling down.

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Sara Eddy (she/they) is the author of two chapbooks of poetry, Tell the Bees (A3 Press, 2019) and Full Mouth (Finishing Line, 2020), and her full-length collection, Ordinary Fissures, will be released by Kelsay Books in March 2024.  She has published widely in print and online literary journals: her poems have appeared in Threepenny Review, South85, Raleigh Review, and Pink Panther, among other venues.  She is Assistant Director of the writing center at Smith College, in Northampton, Massachusetts, and lives in nearby Amherst in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.