SARA FEMENELLA

On Saint Agnes’ Eve, Los Angeles is on Fire

All my drugs are legal now, prescribed
by a gay man in glasses who’s kinder
than he needs to be, who listens to me,
my penitent trifling, my grief like a filigree
of joie de vivre the way I sneak
the empty wine bottles to the recycling
before my husband sees. It’s the American
in me. On the BBC I watch mothers weep
over the white shrouds of their children’s
bodies. On a different channel the local news
shows the fires jump the freeway. I sleep.
One pill, or three. Our son makes a wish
on his candles. Our city burns on each side.
My husband gets troublesome test results
and we both worry. Entire neighborhoods
are displaced, so we buy socks and toothpaste
for the evacuees. In my internet history there
is a quiz on alcohol dependency and Google
searches of Saint Agnes, patron saint of purity,
whose body would not burn. My son asks me
why all the poems I write are sad but just last
summer I walked through the English country
in a field of wild horses with a Shakespeare scholar.
Keats wrote of virgins going to bed without eating
on the eve of Saint Agnes in order to dream
of their future husbands. Tonight’s winter
sky smolders and blackens with smoke.
Just a few weeks ago on New Year’s Eve,
I wrote my biggest wish on a small piece of paper
and lit it on fire. When I dropped the flame
into my glass of champagne and drank it down
I did it because I still believe my future will
not be the thing that finally devastates me.

Sara Femenella’s poems have been published or are forthcoming in The North American Review, Epiphany Journal, Pleiades, The Journal, The New Orleans Review, The Florida Review, Denver Quarterly, and Conduit, among others. Her manuscripts, Elegies for One Small Future and Obedient Daughter, has been a finalist or a semi-finalist for a number of contests, including Autumn House Press’ Poetry Prize, The Waywiser Press Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, Persea Books’ Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize in Poetry and the Poetic Justice Institute Book Prize. She lives Los Angeles with her husband and son, where she teaches American Literature, Shakespeare and Creative Writing.