Sarah Ann Winn | All the while watching | Poets Resist

Sarah Ann Winn’s first book, Alma Almanac (Barrow Street, 2017), won the Barrow Street Book Prize, selected by Elaine Equi. Her fifth chapbook, Exhibition Catalog Pamphlet to the Grimm Forest Open Air Museum was released by Yellow Flag in 2018. Her work has appeared in Five Points, Kenyon Review Online, Massachusetts Review, Smartish Paceand Tupelo Quarterly, among others.

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Also by Sarah Ann Winn: Alma Almanac Haunting the Last House on Holland Island Field Guide to Alma Avenue and Frew Drive

Poets Resist
Edited by Krista Cox
July 8, 2018

Sarah Ann Winn

All the while watching

Fireworks to patriotic music interrupted by spasms of light and sound and broken glass tip of a woman’s red wine beside me, which bled while her husband’s beer breath stuttered as he tried to film clouds of almost too close color. I think this is how we should probably worry about ending — in the costly momentary beauty interrupted by an announcement. Someone’s child is lost, waiting at the sound booth and she doesn’t know the name of her father, but her mother’s name is Ashley. She is Brooklyn, and I am also a place name, lost. Also do not know my father, my country, or know too well only after the flicker-out, or flickering. I will not utter a name to disrupt the darkness between bursts. In the cloud is an emblem of an apocalypse we would not recognize if we saw its outline, which is all we can see right now. And when ashes begin to fall from the sky, remnants of cataclysms on holiday, we go slowly out through the thousand strangers. Home, where our dog awaits, still trembling. He knows enough to be afraid.