Yerra Sugarman was born in Toronto, and lives in New York. She received the 2005 PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award for Poetry for her first collection, Forms of Gone, published by Sheep Meadow Press in 2002. Her second book, The Bag of Broken Glass, was also published by Sheep Meadow in 2008. Her poems and articles have appeared in ACM, The Nation, How2, Pleiades, Barrow Street, Verse Daily, and 100 Poets Against the War. She holds degrees in visual arts from Columbia and Concordia Universities and in writing from City College. She currently teaches poetry at Rutgers University and is Writer in Residence at Eugene Lang College The New School for Liberal Arts.
Story
If it had only been a story
in which your soul breaks through its edges
as I try to switch my eyes for yours
as you stitch yours onto mine
and I am always wrong
I live watching ink crack on a winter
penned in your guttural tongue of branches
an incubation of our insides
your crushed hands sewed to sky
If my grief is inadequate
if there is such a thing as adequate
grief
if as the Rabbi said the mouth is sacred
like the small sound shimmer makes on water
like a woman biting the flesh
of an orange from its peel
then this train heaves
sun bears down on earth
snow hushes the river
everything labors
Out of the Garden
Nothing can help us now.
First, we'll always reap what's bitter,
sowing our salt.
Second, our eyes
will always invoke the possibilities
of our bodies' knowledge:
that the dust of us is sweet,
that the dust of us is sour.
Now, how will we stop loving
the sweet that bitters?
And God said: "I shall multiply
thy sorrow,"
so that our luminous wounds
will heal us,
and we will multiply
our disobedience and our sorrows.
We are fragile
whose bones won't hold
the sky, down-
white and kicked
crimson, the wilderness
of our delicate sobbing.
Nothing can help us now,
a gate's around the iris.
But look!
We can train the wild
vine of our longing.
Look!
Around our wrist-bones
the wisteria is crawling.
as I try to switch my eyes for yours
as you stitch yours onto mine
and I am always wrong
I live watching ink crack on a winter
penned in your guttural tongue of branches
an incubation of our insides
your crushed hands sewed to sky
If my grief is inadequate
if there is such a thing as adequate
grief
if as the Rabbi said the mouth is sacred
like the small sound shimmer makes on water
like a woman biting the flesh
of an orange from its peel
then this train heaves
sun bears down on earth
snow hushes the river
everything labors
Out of the Garden
Nothing can help us now.
First, we'll always reap what's bitter,
sowing our salt.
Second, our eyes
will always invoke the possibilities
of our bodies' knowledge:
that the dust of us is sweet,
that the dust of us is sour.
Now, how will we stop loving
the sweet that bitters?
And God said: "I shall multiply
thy sorrow,"
so that our luminous wounds
will heal us,
and we will multiply
our disobedience and our sorrows.
We are fragile
whose bones won't hold
the sky, down-
white and kicked
crimson, the wilderness
of our delicate sobbing.
Nothing can help us now,
a gate's around the iris.
But look!
We can train the wild
vine of our longing.
Look!
Around our wrist-bones
the wisteria is crawling.
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