Sweetdark

Savannah Brown

First published 2020
1st edition / 01

ISBN: 978-1-5272-6892-0

Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by CPI Group

Cover art by Agnes Cecile
Force of Gravitational Attraction, 2019

www.savbrown.com

to the sweetdarks i have known / will know / know

CONTENTS

void/you
we are the fledglings
the universe may stop expanding in five billion years
too hostile too ticking
the difference
an impeccable functional design
if i've ever made something beautiful
enough
the eternity we share
autopsy, performed gasping
tell me like you mean it
trick of the black light

II.

the parakeets which fly in greenwich park
view including cable cars
a growing thing
spring of the body
rarities
observation
folie a deux
in anticipation of the hydrogen bomb
me, covered in ash
fifty-two blue

III.

bloodsucker
earthly pleasures!
impact
low-level annihilation
ego
me, barefaced, in the sycamore
promise
i want you to look at the moon
on the last day, i can't help
my own small ruin
this too shall devastate
a memory

notes & acknowledgments

I remembered what had been circling in me: I am beautiful. I am full of love. I am dying.

Ada Limón

VOID/YOU

here’s what acquaints you with nature’s dark apathy.
only a child, but one look at the atlantic in flux

is enough to know that’s where you’re meant to pitch your body,
primally, the truth of it written on some hidden artifact, ancient

and yours. do you know the weight of infinite stinging atoms,
the ones you want to love, bent on your destruction? you’ll learn,

ribbony girl limbs pinned for a little lifetime to the sandbar,
your fresh reality that angry lunar rush, crushed chest, your spasming

lungs, tongue brine-sour, young panic. there it is: now you know love
doesn’t cut it. followed by: now you know you can die. and what

are you gonna do about it, huh? first, surface, back into the bleached
midday. hack. the sun snaps above you, like fingers. stagger

out, pursued, little freckle-dusted seraph. mom brings the reckoning,
but it could’ve been anyone, a stranger, or what some people call

god. do you cry? which is you, which is sea? mom says i won’t
have you afraid of the ocean. then she says get back in.

and you do.

it doesn’t matter how, whether or not you shudder at the web-
toed chill or what it promises. if you don’t remember,

you tread until sunset and the world doesn’t end. years
pass, in their quick and unnoticed way. on your left hip,

a scar, tawny and grained, like martian soil, and what’s left
to forgive? not the moon, the earthblood, the only blue being

into which you can slip unknown and unknowable—maybe
just as wronged. but the fear needs somewhere to go, intersecting