top of page
Sarah Van Arsdale

April 21,2022



And then there’s my other sister,

my father’s first daughter,

drifting, a sea-tossed medusa,


tendrils trailing beneath the waves.

Or I could think of her

untethered as star-scattered dust

speckling across the night sky’s dark skirts.

I can still hear her voice,

her adopted Southern lilt.


She decompensated, as the doctors say.

Decompensated, as if

the composition of what made her, her,

could fall away,

floating out to a farther shore

like the lilies on the pond

behind the barn.

When I was small,

she laced up my skates

---hand-me-downs from her---

and wobbled me onto the ice

hand in mittened hand.


I didn’t really know her then

just as I don’t know her now.

But I remember how

she’d make water colors bleed

and bloom

as if she knew an alchemy

no one else could see

or understand.


5 views0 comments

Recent Posts

See All

April 27,2022

Prompt: a duplex, per Jericho Brown The air so still it makes my heart thrum. I can hear the strumming robins’ wings as they dart and dip...

April 26, 2022

On Writing a Novel If I knew how to write a novel, it would be about two sisters in a big, fractured family. They’re in the middle. One...

April 25, 2022

On Learning to Paint More often than not, I’ve simply stood in dumb awe at the world, unmoving, unable to speak, a gasp held tight in my...

Comments


bottom of page