Associate Editor Lisa Low: In Sarah Carson’s prose poem below, the urgency to get to the movie theater on time becomes a sticking point between friends. In a new take on writing about walking, the speaker’s sidewalk path parallels the poem’s journey into the hypothetical, where the act of waiting for someone resonates in the contexts of sizeism, empathy, and human relationships. In the end, walking leads us to more questions—not necessarily revelation—and the dark of the movie theater is one place we can consider what “we owe each other anyway.”
To hear Sarah read the poem, click below:
When I Am 317 Pounds My Friends Do Not Wait for Me to Catch up to Them on a Sidewalk
I’m not saying who’s to blame for this—me, plodding along at the surest pace I can on bones lost inside the thick of so many other ways to love a body, or them, anxious to get to the theater, other people holding our seats in the dark. One day, when I am 122 pounds lighter, I will ask myself who I have not waited for—strangers mostly—women wrangling children in parking garages, men taking too much time to get their coats from the overhead compartment. I mean, what do we owe each other anyway? To treadmill or not to treadmill? To hope someone else will find us? Say eventually I caught up to them at the crosswalk & the flow of traffic forced us all to lumber at the same stupid slow snail’s pace. Say we made it to the theater at the same time, the previews having not yet begun. Say none of us was speaking to the others in the dark as we buried our various weights in Sour Patch Kids, our friendship ending quietly beneath the light of Shailene Woodley’s bright face, the burning city. Or say it didn’t. Say this went on for years.
Sarah Carson is the author of two prose poetry collections, Buick City (Mayapple Press, 2015) and Poems in which You Die (BatCat Press), as well as the forthcoming How to Baptize a Child in Flint, Michigan (Persea Books). Her poetry and other writing has appeared in Diagram, Brevity, Guernica, the Minnesota Review, and others. You can read more of her work at stuffsarahwrote.com.
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