Animal Ballistics

By Sarah Morgan

Sarah Morgan’s newest release of poetry, Animal Ballistics, is dark and charmingly bizarre. This book has a bone for every body - the regret hounds, the lake sympathizers, the lost who embrace their wilderness. Morgan explores the haunting and dream-like sensory of recalling, navigating the long corridors of loss, the four walls of self and the hilarity of the missing roof. Animal Ballistics digs at the root of survival, thoughtfully and comparatively holding it against the definition of “living.â€

Animal Ballistics destroys what proof you have about survival... Sarah Morgan’s words make one feel as if they should begin to live and love with an originality - a new species of the spirit. -Danny Sherrard “Cast Your Eyes Like Riverstones into the Exquisite Dark"

• Language: English
• Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
• Release date: Aug 13, 2010
• ISBN: 9781935904793

Sarah Morgan

Sarah Morgan is a USA Today and Sunday Times bestselling author of contemporary romance and women's fiction. She has sold more than 21 million copies of her books and her trademark humour and warmth have gained her fans across the globe. Sarah lives with her family near London, England, where the rain frequently keeps her trapped in her office. Visit her at www.sarahmorgan.com

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Title Page

Animal Ballistics

a collection of poetry

†

by Sarah Morgan

Write Bloody Publishing

America’s Independent Press

Long Beach, CA

writebloody.com

Copyright Information

Copyright © Sarah Morgan 2010

No part of this book may be used or performed without written consent from the author, if living, except for critical articles or reviews.

Morgan, Sarah.

1st digital edition.

ISBN: 978-1-935904-79-3.

Interior Layout by Lea C. Deschenes

Cover Designed by Brandon Lyon

Proofread by Jennifer Roach

Edited by Derrick Brown, Saadia Byram and Michael Sarnowski

Printed in Tennessee, USA

Write Bloody Publishing

Long Beach, CA

Support Independent Presses

writebloody.com

To contact the author, send an email to [e-mail]

Dedication

for Gregory P. Silk

Special Thanks

Special Thanks

Shauna Morgan

Derrick Brown

Ross Hickerson

Chelsea Ellington

Sarah Octopus Haas

Anis Mogjani

Danny Sherrard

Mark Chaump

Paul Maziar

Lea Deschenes

Dan Leaman

Infusion Café Poets

Vox Ferus

Griswald

You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion . . . Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.

– Aldous Huxley

Train

A black umbrella opens in my chest.

How fast the landscape trickles by,

I’m trying to understand

what would break first if I jumped from this boxcar.

Through the window,

mountains of graffiti, rocks, and hunchback fences,

a three-wheeler,

yellow, red, and forgotten

among the rubble.

There is a man behind me,

a black Southern gent,

talking to someone he loves.

He’s started humming something now,

gentle as Georgia.

I want him to choke.

There is a foreigner to my left;

I don’t think he can read this.

If I knew any of that lover language,

I’d write . . . Are you reading this?

He smells like a fire pit of dehydrated embers,

like one or all of my ex-flames.

I want his euro-techno headphones to explode into him.

Diagonally—a stupid-beautiful young girl

in slender boots that I would use to ride horses.

I want her to get pregnant, lost, fat,

yellow then red then forgotten.

And then me—

among the heaps of pebble, web and gang names,

with a shirt reading Can i hold you?

Tears smuggling the luster from my cheeks—

turpentine to mahogany.

I only weep in profoundly public places

where no one dares ask.

If they did,

I’d swallow hard,

like a grade-school blow job,

like your first funeral.

I’d swallow hard and tell them to piss off

or

something pleasant,

as long as I could blow my snot

into their palm pilots.

You see,

there is a tiny retired maestro

inside my skin.

The grand orchestra plays on

with no regard for him.

He’s squatting on track six,

plucking other empty notes,

using playbills as toilet tissue.

My poor minor chord friend . . .

I’ve taken track seven again.

When I get to where I’m going

I’m sure I’ll pull out a quarter or two

from a phone booth in the Northwest,

looking for an answer,

finding only an abandoned G-clef.

I am dressed in layers of trains.

I showed up

with no pulse in my voice,

loose change,

stark naked.

My heart, calling from a phone booth

in the rain.

The Pickling

Blinking at the ceiling,

a sterile voice told me it just didn’t take.

There was still a pitter-patter.

The fleshy onion plummets to the stew below.

I wanted you then.

Before you ever thought money or war or women,

I laid on the examining bench

with all my useless hopes:

baseball cards in spokes,

teaching you music theory,

un-punishing you against time.

I put my hand to my womb

as if it were a garden hose running dry—

as if the perennials would never come again.

Why We are Different

You like peppers.

I do not.

The girl you love