ISSUE V
Sara Iacovelli
alaskan break up song
up here, we don’t say spring— we say
the break-up.
season of cracks in ice.
january, you could drive a semi-truck
on the river.
april, your own body
too heavy
to hold.
last day
before spring break,
I helped a child
pull snow pants on for recess,
helped him fix the backwards E
in his name.
asked, when he screamed
at circle time,
do you need to take
a break?
spring break is neither spring
nor break-up.
only when the days
get longer.
second week of march.
then third.
fourth.
this year, spring
break
outlasting school year.
last day I held
a hand half the size of mine,
our city was frozen.
today,
it’s breaking up again.
snow melting,
streets flooding,
avalanches warning
again.
river arage, pacing,
packing
winter’s bags,
shouting don’t come back
out the door.
season of self
-isolation.
lose count
of the days. we don’t say
spring— we say
mud season.
single
set of footsteps
trudging
through.
EDITORIAL PRAISE
What struck me most about “alaskan break-up song” was its form and enjambment. Visually, it evokes a broken ice floe on the page, words and phrases drifting from one another, itself a “break up.” The line breaks in this poem created an anticipation and anxiety for me as a reader—all I could think about was loss and distance. “I helped a child / pull snow pants on for recess [. . . ]” Tenderness and precarity. “Season of self / -isolation.” Acceptance and rejection. The line break is the precipice of possibility, and this poet wields it with confidence and clarity.
Sara Iacovelli is a poet and a preschool teacher. She has gone to grad school too many times, though never for writing; she holds degrees in comparative literature and special education. She lives in the northern catskills with her partner, her very large dog, and her very soft cat. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pine Hills Review, *82 Review, Prairie Home Magazine, Barren Magazine, and Eunoia Review.