Mercurial Annual Feature
Mercurial Annual Feature
Sarah Butkovic
Sarah is actively making her way in the creative writing world. She received her MA in English from Loyola University Chicago in 2023; she’s published creative and journalistic writing within and outside an academic setting, including a news piece in a local Chicago paper.
Scroll down to see her works we’ve selected.
fourth of july
i think about what poetry is supposed to be about
as i swallow the gum-ball eyes
of a sherbet spongebob popsicle,
watching his skewered body become an abstract mess
of bleeding colors while the vibrant
trills of youth eddy around my ankles.
is it about how i’m too old to wear glowstick bangles and
paint my chuck taylors in verdant rebellion? i’m no
longer a nascent bloom of
cherry and sapphire glitter but college really
wasn’t that long ago, and i remind myself of this
as i watch homemade fireworks self-destruct
into kamikaze bursts of napalm and rhinestones.
or maybe, i think, it’s about how limerence leaks out of me
like silent droplets of condensation,
slurpees and lemonades abandoned
on street curbs and dirty diner counters,
pitching fevers that won’t break until the
sun grows tired of hanging in a burning sky.
or what if it’s about beauty and
how i’m supposed to be in the prime of my life,
a static flower stuck in full bloom,
an open rose erect and rife with powdered sugar pollen.
if that’s true then why do i feel so lopsided and uncouth,
overgrown and unripe
as if there was a defect in the soil i was raised in?
whatever the case, i blink and miss the
zenith of midsummer.
families plod along the grass like world-weary soldiers,
the phantom etchings of the season
slowly fading into black and navy bruises up above.
Inspirations: David Bowie, Robin Williams, Marsha P. Johnson, George Michael
the brutalist
on friday night
a young man spilled his drink in my direction
and two days later i was sitting next to him
in a musty, crowded theater,
struck and enraptured by a three and a half hour long art
film. he was a cardboard cutout on my left
and his friend was a ghost on my right,
an electric shadow leaning over to whisper
about lights, angles, cinematography,
as if we’d known everything about each other for years
except the resting rate of our heartbeats
and how two a.m. looked painted on our bedroom walls.
the three of us became a single entity in the navy blue darkness,
and at midnight when we all dispersed
and i climbed into my powdered-sugar car,
i put the film’s soundtrack on full blast
and wondered if it’d ever see those two men again.
because perhaps our paths were only meant to cross
for an ephemeral forty-eight hours,
and tomorrow we’d all move on with our lives
and i’d cook breakfast alone in my apartment
with the movie poster haphazardly taped to my wall.
but right now it’s monday morning
and i know nothing
except that life can be funny sometimes.
Share how you get out of a writing slump:
Put on the "Whiplash" soundtrack and force myself to write, even if it's nonsensical, even if it's bad, even if it's something I'll delete later.
applesauce
i am an ouroboros of self-immolating doubt.
every minor obstacle in my life feels like
an assailant
and every interaction I have must be blown up
under a microscope for immediate scrutinization —
sandwich my mistakes between thick wedges of glass.
if there’s one thing I’ve learned from science class
it’s that there is no escape
when heavy fluorescents strip the shadow away
from every crevice and contour.
i am a wreck because of what happened in math class.
i am a wreck over things that don’t matter, and
i know my future self
will come to this realization later. i know
that whatever I’m worried about now will be nothing more
than an inconspicuous blip six months down the line. i
take solace in this fact, purely out of necessity.
because at this moment i still
must live with the snot-dripping glassy-eyed version of me.
a terrible roommate, runny like human applesauce,
all mushy and mawkish
and meant to be swallowed without chewing.
i sniffle, buckle, waffle, whimper, sob and shout, then scream and cry
but tomorrow i may not do any of those things,
and instead i may be asking myself:
“what was the big deal in the first place?”
Give us a writing prompt!
When you wake up in the middle of the night, you notice that the doors in your new house disappear and reappear in places they shouldn't be. What do you do?
The Spring Wind
it hasn’t been this warm since my hair was long
and it feels like the sun planned it out perfectly —
to bake our skin gently
while the wind swept us up like kite tails in the sky and there
must’ve been a lot of wind during my year-long leave because
you’ve been smoothed out and leveled,
furnished by the elements into a fully-formed man.
you have entire ecosystems in your clearwater eyes,
teeming with the blue innocence of adolescence
and spilling stories without speaking a word.
we look less alike now, you and i.
in fact, i look like the younger cousin
but I don’t really mind.
four hours have never fallen through my hands more quickly
than they did that easter sunday.
placing half empty beer cans behind parked cars
and poisoning our ears with trashy tunes
while the sun said its irish goodbye and dipped behind
the mountaintops of midwestern houses —
those moments are transient dandelion seeds
that drift without notice in the bustle of life.
but i think i’ll find those tiny seeds —
i’ll pick them up off the overgrown grass
and take them to my grave if poetry really counts for something.
because i want to remember the sun on my face
and how disheveled we got with the car windows down.
i want to remember before we grow old
and can only look back with a wrinkled smile
more fleeting than that lovely april afternoon.