Sarah Heady
from “The Hudson Lines”
A train creaks through the Park Avenue tunnel.
Sun spills through a grate onto an underground pile of dust.
Up there: epicenter of the world’s every motion.
Down here: the start of a scrying I’ve always known, an interior mirror.
Shadows curve into a heart-shape on a warehouse wall: the kitchen chairs
with heart-shaped backs in my childhood home, two stations from here.
How the metal somehow had a smell.
How my arms are hot in the sun, an hour now at the western window, watching the river unspool
from my elbow.
A bald patch at the top of the ridge, stripped of trees to who knows what end.
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022, finalist for the National Poetry Series) and Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013, winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award). She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a documentary opera about the death and life of a women’s college. Sarah is the recipient of residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, In Cahoots, Bethany Arts Community, and Art Farm. Raised in the Hudson River Valley of New York State, she now lives in San Francisco.
Sarah Heady is a poet and essayist interested in place, history, and the built environment. She is the author of two full-length poetry collections: Comfort (Spuyten Duyvil, 2022, finalist for the National Poetry Series) and Niagara Transnational (Fourteen Hills, 2013, winner of the Michael Rubin Book Award). She is also the librettist of Halcyon, a documentary opera about the death and life of a women’s college. Sarah is the recipient of residencies from the Corporation of Yaddo, In Cahoots, Bethany Arts Community, and Art Farm. Raised in the Hudson River Valley of New York State, she now lives in San Francisco.