The fruit of the New Moon is gift shop earrings / I build an altar to the strawberry preserves at the
carryout / I believe in the spice aisle & junk shops & hangovers too murky to be existential / My faith is
honey mustard / My faith is a figment of Saturday light / There are so many lovely choices to be made
[cream or no] & every stranger is telling me how good the morning is / These preserves are sacred
because a grandmother would serve them / These preserves are a figment of history / coagulated, rosy happenstance / It is significant that today I put on pink corduroys & you ordered a waffle with
strawberries / that they brought us this small fortune & we lived exactly this way / You are busy with
your sinuses, sliding cash under the sugar shaker / & I get to be alone in this delight / I could scotch
tape today into my diary & make a mythos of this / I could learn to love the afternoon & even
Aquarius season / I could tattoo on my chest how it feels to peer into a window advertising “taroah
card reader” / & not miss any past lives / & belong so wholly to this / to these berries hulled &
immortalized in syrup

Published July 5th, 2020

Sara Mae (she/they) is a white, queer fashion witch and community organizer currently orbiting Baltimore, Maryland. She is the 2017 IWPS rep for Slam Free Or Die, a 2018 Emerson College CUPSI team member, and a 2018 Boston Poetry Slam NPS team member. Their work can be found in Tinderbox, Hobart Pulp, Breakwater Review and elsewhere. She is the winner of the inaugural Peach Mag Bronze Prize, selected by Morgan Parker. Their first chapbook, Priestess of Tankinis, is out via Game Over Books. In their free time, they are learning burlesque in the studio or in their bedroom, and writing songs for their project The Noisy. If she could go to dinner with any famous person, she wouldn’t care who it was as long as there was Old Bay on the food.

Alyson Vega is a fiber artist from New York City with a BA in Japanese Folklore and Mythology from Harvard University. After 22 years of working as a teacher, and as part of her recovery from brain surgery, Vega turned exclusively to her art practice. Since 2013, Vega has been part of Fountain House, a studio and gallery space for ‘artists living with mental illness’, where she regularly exhibits her work.

Vega’s first solo show, Project Room, was at White Columns in 2016.
https://www.fountainhousegallery.org/gallery/mission