National Poetry Month : Sarah Hilton,

 

 

Lockjaw II

 

Remember the year I learned
how to hold you in my fist? Do you

remember the taste copper
warm lining the tongue, nightly
terrors eating up the dark.
            A yearly practice:
in the summers my skin spills out 

from the opening door—legs melted
down to pulp, fingers
are ribbon on the pavement. 

The next day, you watched
them lap it up in the puddles filling
the sidewalk, body turned to
milk in the hollow of their mouths. They said

the summers made us hungry. They said this

was gravity. One summer, I saw
how their blood ran hot pressing
bulbous on the backs of their hands— 

different doors already opened. Did it
change things depending on the hole
you’ve locked up—teeth grinding against
the eye of a house; a man’s belly

a shapeless silhouette behind streetlights? Did you forget
who you were the first time
you became a knife brought to dinner?

 

 

 

Sarah Hilton is a queer poet from Scarborough. Her work has been most recently featured in Untethered, deathcap, Release Any Words Stuck Inside You III, and Hart House Review. She is the author of homecoming (Model Press) and, most recently, Saltwater Lacuna (Anstruther Press). In 2020, she was awarded the E. Nelson James Poetry Award, and she was shortlisted for the Laura K. Alleyne Difficult Fruit Poetry Prize. Sarah is a soon-to-be librarian pursuing a Master of Information at the University of Toronto. She can be reached on Instagram @sar_ahhil and on Twitter @hilton_sarah_