Posts by Sarah Kanabay

Before and After

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on January 18th, 2014

On the day that Anson died we went down to the water in the flat grey light and I found a rock with a split white band across it like a web of heat and put it in my pocket. Lorna has a jar of these that sits on a shelf in the kitchen, filled with water, so that she can see them as they had been when she found them, and I wondered if she’d prefer to fill Anson’s coffin with water too, for this same reason. But, we didn’t. His body was burnt up and then it was parceled out and it left our hands and went into the wind one shake at a time. The shape of it rising was like…

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Clean

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on January 18th, 2014

I went out to the Pacific with an alcoholic Montanan who ran the camera for a weather program and had a Jeep that smelled like soup. I bought a key and put it on a chain around my neck and bad coffee and the rain found every unsealed part of whatever I was wearing and put its hands in there, and jesus, it was cold. He wanted pictures of us there on the sand and I didn’t want to lie but I said sure. The first week in a new city, a year later, my car was broken into and the photos were stolen and it seemed like it was supposed to happen that way. Going home is mostly a process of cataloging…

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Fatherless in Ypsilanti

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on September 30th, 2013

The chief problem with Michigan was that there was so goddamn much of it. And, as with anything large and obvious, its sheer accumulation of facts made it difficult to see. Which is why its disappearance at first registered only with startled birds, farmers, lake lovers, that June. Miles away, on an eastern shore, Milo would tell himself later that he felt the echo of it going when it happened, the way Kepler claimed to have felt the faint warmth of moonlight on the backs of his hands some solitary evening. Mostly because it was a good story, and mostly because of Kate. They’d only dated for a few months, when he’d worked on Abner’s lobster pots, and she’d had the misfortune to…

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Brief History

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on August 19th, 2013

I. The fish is not large enough. It is black and nearly round, and then other colors when it lands, spines out, in my palm, and we have killed it anyway. It drifts cockeyed beneath the cement that makes up this small bridge. The road is dusty. I lie down on my stomach, and stretch a still pale arm, a burning back, down to catch the body as it makes its way into the tunnel. It slips against my fingers. Don’t tell anyone, you say, laughing, and I say that I won’t, only now, I have. The beer smell won’t leave my water bottle for a month. The sunburn goes, after two days. The bruised plum that I eat in the hot car on…

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In The Beginning

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on July 19th, 2013

* Dog goes down to the water in the blank heat of the middle part of the day and sits. The air is open-palmed and slow across the back of her neck, and the grass chews itself down into the sand at the top of the bank. Dog is not her real name, but it is the one that she has been given at camp. Camp waits on the other side of the meadow, and it is all tanned, tall, smooth-limbed counselors. It is clipboards that trail long comets of embroidery floss, woven into bracelets for people that are not her. When the sun reached its whitest eye, Dog had taken her plastic bag of warming carrots and the smooth sweat of her one…

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Out of the Arm of One Loaf…

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on July 17th, 2013

out of the arm of one loaf and into the arms of another I have been saved from eating and being cross by a bread that beats pot beats songs and stories and is much softer than the last, much much softer and the crumb is just as good or better. It isn’t pleasant to be hotly crossed and left there, it is much more pleasant to forget a bun which didn’t rise as all yeast finally doesn’t rise… it is much more pleasant to eat along the crust in Des Moines in the back room, and afterwards sitting up in bed drinking cold milk, your tongue touching crumbling softness like a wave… I have tried too many times kneading and waiting, waiting…

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What We Talk About When We Talk About Sandwiches

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on June 24th, 2013

There’s a midnight sidewalk and someone is saying that making food is asking someone to like you, even a small amount. We are cooks and we do this sometimes. This sentence is like being seen. Walking to the car is like pulling all of your clothes on again, in a hurry. The street lamp is a yolk. And this falls apart when you see the insects lifting towards it, in the light. The night isn’t bread. It is full of smoke, drifting in from some further house. Some unseen cooking fire. But the point is that there aren’t two neat halves wrapping the lamp so that it will fit down the cat-mouth of the evening—the lamp just hangs there. And the moths rise…

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Secret Handshake

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on May 17th, 2013

I’ve spent no small amount of time feeling that I needed to be more rooted to the here and now. That my life was something that I was constantly sliding off of. Life as greased pig. I’d fling myself on top of it, only to have it run squealing for the fences again. Half of the time I’d feel the sharp loss, and the other half of the time I’d want to sit back on my haunches in the mud, light up a cigarette, and say ‘fuck you too, mister.’ Farming, in my mind, had always seemed a sure-bet way to anchor oneself to the present. There’s nothing more immediate, after all, than dirt, than weather, bare and uncaring. The last time I…

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To The Teeth

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on April 18th, 2013

1. You pinch, she says her knuckles punched in faces, cracked with work, breathing their sentence to me across the cold air, putting the knife in my new hand, it must be new it is shaking and then the crisp exact nature of the first cut– onions, blood. 2. You take on knowing the way of this, cloth licking ink, water, muscle linking nerve, heavy with a thin sharp edge and its motions the song that parts and pieces your minutes, hours, the deep hard heat of taking from the whole, first one leaf then another another another. 3. The days are some sleepless rotation, bitter black coffee, sly dirt dawns, cold one at a…

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The Long Hill

Sarah Kanabay

Posted on March 18th, 2013

It is March and here, miles inland, gulls are circling around the barn-buckled roof of my house. I imagine my recently acquired mid-century modern swan lamp feeling some sympathetic tug towards the window, to be out. To be away. The light is slowly dialing itself down between the houses. Everything going pale gold, the clouds sporting some darker breath at the horizon. Weather in the offing. Spring has yet to fully arrive, necessitating this heavy wool cardigan, the hiking socks I have on my feet, propped on an empty wine crate beneath the desk. But—we feel it running now, in the vein. The sap’s high. Leaving a store downtown on an errand, I feel something like breath on my cheek, and turn, startled to…

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