Sara Parrell
Sara Parrell was a recent winner
in the Wisconsin People & Ideas magazine’s 2007 poetry contest and her work
has appeared in previous issues of the Wisconsin Academy Review, the Lake Wingra
Morning anthology, and other journals.
Her most recent publication, Nocturne,
is a collaboration with photographer and musician
Thomas Ferrella. Regionally, Sara is invited to lead
workshops on writing and the healing arts. As a pediatric nurse she has
practiced and taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and most recently
works with children in the public schools.
She lives with her husband Grayson Kampschroer
in
E. Ethelbert Miller’s comments:
“Good poetry should
move one beyond headlines and even history.
That’s what I found happening when I read “Psalms of
Sara Parrell
From Psalms of
Psalm 116: the sorrows
of death compassed me
She remembers her lost child and presses it between
her brain’s satin folds, answers
the curious
journalist- no matter how sad I sound it’s nothing
like it used to be.
in business, porta-potties
overflow,
slinks through heaped trash all the
way to the ferry.
She can’t remember how many days
rooftops appeared
as postage stamps from copters
swung overhead,
too far away, everyone praying not
to die too
soon. A Saints’ hat floats within
reach, spinning,
a child’s toy in the psychedelic
water. She mutters
first lines of lullabies and a
one-note dirge that simply
comes to her and won’t leave, then
hears
maul-swings and crow-bar pries, shovels scraping
fusty mud from her kitchen linoleum, drywall
thudding onto sub-floor, the scuff of hungry
cockroaches. At the curb an orange-hooded EPA crew
pokes and prods the house-high hill of all-that-was
searching for toxins tossed in the
wrong place, finds
a few bottles and cans, claws them
onto the flatbed.
Cups of salvation
she thinks and scans the crumpled
photo his gloved hand offers her—grinning
daughter, black lab licking her
ear, behind them the 60’s
brick ranch flash-blurred, burnished, nearly dust.