SARAH LEVINE

Forgotten Things

      after Dean Young


Imagine you put your face against store windows
selling paper flowers and wooden horses,
rooms filled with forgotten things.
You were made because two bodies forgot
the uncertainty of risk, ignored
recitation of kiss kiss tremble, a sermon
announcing the end of free love.
Love taught you to stand inside an ocean, feel the fish
smear their scales on wave after forgotten wave, all in the name of homecoming. 
Love taught no manners, 
fire set to someone’s orchard so you become peach jam for days. How absurd 
to be given a mouth that craves fruit bruised into sugar. 
The forgotten sun gored pulp, originally gnawed by rain and the inch worm’s 
grotesque bite. How easy it is now to chase chickens 
wearing the reddest dress, legs running loud like forgotten pianos 
being banged into existence.



218  The Paris-American
Sarah Levine is currently teaching 7th Grade and AP Literature at Williston Northampton School. Her forthcoming chapbook, Take Me Home, was selected by Leah Maines as a finalist for the 2019 Finishing Line Press New Women's Voices Chapbook Prize. Her poems have appeared in Passages North, Best New Poets, Green Mountains Review, among other publications. She holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and an MAT from Smith College. Levine has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, won Westchester Review's Writers Under 30 Contest, and is the author of the chapbook, Her Man (New Megaphone Press, 2014).
Upcoming poet:
Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley