Poetry by Sara Eddy

Edna Winti CC




How I Forgive You

I bury the evidence deep,
then dig it back up to kiss it

square on its bony mouth.
I feel nothing–I allow myself

no feeling. I court bitterness, 
but feed it honey and elderflower

until it is just another weed in the garden.
I talk about it with all my starling

voices in the treetops, until
the chaos resolves into polyphony.

I keep at it, I keep at it, give it my back
and the swell of my chest,

and one day I find a new sapling,
a new sucker, growing in the side yard.

That might be all we get,
but it’s something, it’s a living thing.





You Fool Yourself

You take a boat out into the middle of the lake
with swallows skimming around you and clouds

swimming up to you. Looking back to shore
you find an inlet with no houses, no beach, just 

rocky crags too rough for a rope swing.
You paddle into the shadows of that cove where fish 

think fishy thoughts. There is no one anywhere 
in all the world but you and the still water, the trout,

the kingfisher. You think maybe life could be like that.
You think, maybe I’m good.


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Sara Eddy’s second full-length poetry collection, How to Wash a Rabbit, is forthcoming from Cornerstone Press.  She is also author of Ordinary Fissures (2024), and two chapbooks: Full Mouth (2020), and Tell the Bees (2019).  Her poems have appeared in many online and print journals, including Threepenny Review, Raleigh Review, Sky Island, and Baltimore Review, among others. She lives in Amherst, Massachusetts, in a house built by Emily Dickinson’s cousin.
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