Deliver me from this rubble,
a bent beam, rusted square nails, laths
smashed to slivers.
I’ve learned my soul
is not me it is the wrinkled
woman sitting at my feet
curled in the body’s great shadow
mumbling aha
aha and all the muddy while
my body is scuffed, nicked,
pierced, but still I hear
how the old one sings and sighs
let such as love thy salvation say
make the best of destruction.
Outside my house of ruins
a live oak quakes
cirrus tufts float and pulse—
help me make certain
her strung-together notes
call the lost ones back.
Sara Parrell won first prize in the 2008 Poetry Center of Chicago’s Juried Reading for her manuscript Psalms of New Orleans. Her poetry has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, qarrtsiluni, and the 2013 Cowfeather Press anthology, Echolocations. Sara is faculty at the UW-Madison School of Nursing, and a member of the Madison public schools’ mental health consultation team.