Sarah Busse – String Poet

I prefer these northern strugglers, plunked
in inhospitable front yards, and banked

each winter against the cold. No bigger than
a man, crabbed and flowering the briefest span

of days each spring, a week at most. The petals stark-
soft as milk against the still bare branches’ rough-cragged bark.

Too quick, the blown
petals wet brown

and shriveled over the cooling grass,
a frayed and fraying lace.

These are the rehearsal rooms of the brain.
Strangely echoed, some, and others
strangely dead, wander once more
the narrow, ill-lit halls.

Rehearsing and rehearsing
on the instrument of haunt, reversing again,
and overheard through walls, muffled,
a someone else, anonymous, not quite

in tune, remembered ever, trying
and trying (how much we want)
to get that passage right.

Sarah Busse co-edits the poetry magazine Verse Wisconsin.
Her poetry has been published in a wide variety of journals and received the WFOP Chapbook Prize, as well as a Pushcart Prize, in 2011. Her first full-length collection will be published by Mayapple Press in the fall of 2012. She lives with her husband and two childen in Madison, Wisconsin.