Two Poems by Jo-Ella Sarich

​Pussy Riot

Did you hear about
the poet from
Myanmar
who asserted he got
U Thein Sein
(the president then)
inscribed upon his manhood?
He got six months for that
indiscretion. If only I was so

well endowed, such a brazen canvas, no doubt,
would make my father proud. I
don’t believe I'd like to see your face on my …

wherever
The bracing ingénue might break
the existential tundra
and I might find myself receiving

four years or even longer.

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​Fluorescent

You see them around you, sun-bedding in the evening glow of their screens.

Walking back from the tea room, the water that is always hot, the tea bag that drowns for the second and last time.

Through the monitor stands in a corridor of necks.

Think.

              What will I do with all these emails?

Stuffing handover notes into the rigid folder that’s battleship grey. Ring Binders rattling empty on shelves, languishing like Soviet apartment blocks.

More notes, copious notes, for the man who will be doing your job. Your  job. Millions of tiny bullet points, Post-its waving from files. Fractals of yourself, reduced to paper. Reducing the irreducible self.

              Don't worry, I'll be able to understand them,Don’t worry, he laughs.

Someone else jokes about awkward goodbye hugs. You don’t. Embrace. Clutching that card with the clumsy expressions. You’ve done it yourself, more notes. Does it come true if you write it again and again? Does it matter if I don't remember your name? Reading handwriting searching for meaning, when you’re not the one holding the
pen. You hold the flowers bulging at their life-source end. Someone offers you a jug

Those emails that float upwards like feathers. Those lights ...

how home can be a passing phase, how we sit to feel safe. Sitting around you now, those faces in the sallow lights, and it’s evening outside. Setting like the nascent self. I think I will miss them, sitting around the split-open chip packets, but wonder will I miss my life? If I walked out, holding my box of desktop photos, climbed onto the train that glides, away and something breaks. And as you face those empty faces, know that Nothing waits, nothing but the end of the train as you walk

              through its corridors, and turn the lights off one last time.


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Image - deepbreaths
www.flickr.com/photos/breaths/
creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/

 Bio: Jo-Ella Sarich has worked as a lawyer for a number of years, and has recently started writing again after a rather long hiatus. Her poetry has appeared in Tuck Magazine and The Galway Review, and will be appearing in the upcoming Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017. http://mysticalfirenight.tumblr.com/


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