sarah jean alexander

Image by Peter Cole Friedman

Procedure

1.
Why isn’t every picture that exists of you with someone else
a picture of you with me instead

All of these people are so many people
and none of these people are me

2.
I am sitting in a corner eleven stories high and
I am a very long time away from you
We laugh but make extremely worried faces

3.
I am being myopic because there is only
one screen in front of me and one screen in front of you
and we are practically touching in here

4.
(feeling real is hard work / moving is even harder)

5.
Spring forward, fall back down
I'm trying not to wonder where you are

Are you listening to this too

6.
It seems irrational that in 2015
I cannot just be in love with another person
who wants to be near me in the same ways

Like hello welcome to this place
Let’s both just stay

A long time ago someone told me that
it is not cute to be persistent
(I know you don’t belong to me)
but I am so good at it
I think you will agree

7.
After twenty minutes in Karpeles I took a three hour walk
to be alone because there are so many books in the world already
and you are too good

You squeezed a sigh out of me when I returned and I felt found

8.
Last night I dreamt someone offered me one thousand dollars to close my eyes and sit on a
chair for sixty seconds and instead I moved onto the floor, kneeled and retched loudly in front
of him. I stared at my hands pressed flat against the floor. I lifted them up one by one. I slowly
crawled out of the room.

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SARAH JEAN ALEXANDER is an American writer from Brooklyn. She is the author of Wildlives (Big Lucks Books, 2015) and has been featured in Spork, Hobart, Dazed Digital, Fanzine and in other print & digital publications.