Dutch, by Jo-Ella Sarich

Fried Egg, by Tjalf Sparnaay (Netherlands). Contemporary. Click on image for artist website.

Dutch

Lump-rumpled buns gurn over soft eggs, over-churned
mayonnaise on everything even fries. Lapping at the upward
swathe of the weather-moon makes you want to varnish your own arm,
and eat that too. Lay your ample

frame under silver halide and contemplate each pore collecting
refuse from cobbled paths in darkened alleyways, inert-gas lights haunt
the girl walking with her back to the canal and the sign that reads
gesloten. Lettuce on plates. Slather on lavish-thick like

sea scum on the gel-bellied whale, pressing an ever more present
sonogram into the sea wall where glass eels
slot into latch-key diagrams
to hide the smell of their DNA. The sternum

connects the clavicle, stars hide the oldest
of their songs. Lace curtains are gamma rays. Cocktail umbrellas hover above glass and the

meisje’s red hair is still visible above the sand, who shot and killed Nazis. And in
Haarlem tonight the woman in the window is awfully present. Women in the
Sahara. Women in Dublin back-alleys and
migrant workers in Dubai. Amsterdam is like

Phoenix, someone said -
Rotterdam is like New York. Buildings slung wide
and bunker-sunken like wooden peg blocks,
wharf lapping the ashes out of their reclaimed beer steins and
bombed out of all recognition.

Jo-Ella Sarich

Jo-Ella Sarich has practised as a lawyer for a number of years, recently returning to poetry after a long hiatus. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The New Verse News, Cleaver Magazine, Blackmail Press, Barzakh Magazine, Poets Reading the News, The Galway Review, Anti-Heroin Chic, takahē magazine and the Poetry New Zealand Yearbook 2017.
 https://mysticalfirenight.tumblr.com/, @jsarich_writer.





​