POETRY BY ALBA SARRIA

Alba Sarria is a poet and flash fictionist fascinated by all things eerie and disquieting, especially when it mixes with mythology and folklore. Albais a 2018 CSPA Gold Circle Award winner for freeform poetry and the Gold Circle 2021 CM for fiction. She has 18 publications and is excitedly working on her manuscript for a horror poetry collection.

As a lover of calming nighttime walks through the cemetery, Alba has plenty of supernatural to share. More work can be found under the pen name Damian A. Craft.

THUNDER COMES KNOCKING

Rain shakes the foundations as She 
comes to the door.

She’s dressed in tears:
in the thousands of melting faces
She has touched.
The thousands of blood-clotted fashions she’s ruined.
Coat after coat
Color after color
Face after face.
Life
after 
Life
Running, sogging, dissolving
through her waters.

“Beloved,”
is the voice of thunder;
the voice that births life and
floods it.
She raps her knuckles against the door as
Coat
Color
Face
rumble off her, 
pooling in streaks of stringy pink on the porch.
It rolls thickly, cooly, under the door.

The keyhole becomes a fountain mouth;
running rusted red.
Your professor once said amazonian
floods are copper; blisteringly bright with minerals
life bursts at each touched red drop. 
Somewhere in your drafts
you have an email labeled for him
Life Does Not Burst It Drowns.

Your carpet floods,
stains.
The halls run like streams
screams 
brushing your ankles in cold
crushing cascades.
That’s another thing they don’t tell you,
life and death spring from the same thing:
Cold.

She knows you have woken, feels you struggle
—one foot in front of the other—through her flood
and remains 
un-knocking at the door.

Your smile is running,
thawing into the rushing tide.
Your hands are shaking.
It is so much like drowning
your heart cannot tell the difference.
The knob slips and slips from under 
your fumbling numbing thumbs.

“Allow me.”
Her voice flows through the keyhole,
gentle, rocking with love.
It vibrates around your ankles.
Bubbles deep in the basement,
in the fluid chambers of your heart.

The lock breaks under water weight.

Your life runs away from you:
Couch swept out the back door.
A floating pizza box, still warm, slips
through the open window.
Your forgotten keys become entangled in loose
cords. 
Your clothing dissolves.
The family photos
heirlooms
decorates
dinner plates
drift away.

All your life has lived indoors,
in waiting.

“Beloved,”
You step out to greet her
with a kiss.

MOING’IIMA

Heavy come harvest
Heavy come harvest

The squash, they grow:
grow 
drip
droop
drop
from his body.

Watermelon,
Corn,
Always sacred Corn,
hang
bloom
sprout 
drip
droop
drop
from his body;
from the boy.

Heavy comes harvest.

He is full,
stooped
dragging
panting 
sagging
with watermelon,
squash,
Corn
Always sacred Corn.

In the night he leaves drag marks
across your front door.

In the evening his breathless gasps
urge the wind to chill.

Heavy heavy–

In the mornings, sickles raised, 
we sing 
heavy comes harvest heavy come—
as he collapses in the field, encircled
above by croning bloodied crows.

COMMUNITY CENTER 

He roams the halls
Soaked in red light
School converted community center
Converted
Unresting place 
For the boy.

In the nights he plays 
On the swings
Swaying
Up down up down up down u—
In the still air

I want to swing beside him
What is your name?
Do you long for a friend?

But Those That Live in the Woods
Watch
And even the grass to which I call
For protection
Can only do so much to keep
Them at bay
So close to the Wood’s edge.