Winning Poem, New Year Poems of Hope Contest: Before and afterlife, Sarah Burke Cahalan

Sarah Burke Cahalan writes about natural history,  hope/grief/faith, the layers of places and how those correspond with our own layers as people moving through time and place. She has poems, current or forthcoming, in Hog River Press, Poetry is Currency, Trampoline, and others. Sarah is from Massachusetts and is currently based in Dayton, Ohio (USA).

Before and afterlife

Sometimes on the mattress
there are
stains,
the entropic egressions
of those
veins
that cannot take the pressure
of their blood, that
leak
and swell extremities, distress them
raw and tender,
pink —
despite our care as we compress
her legs in socks and
straps
which resemble, more or less,
Lazarus’s
wraps,
linen strips from homespun flax,
unraveling as
he surfaces.

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