"Rue Musette" by Sarah Sloat

France cast a columnar silhouette. In the travel brochure the people who vandalized Dijon’s church were called revolutionaries. They studied the smoke instead of the fire. Another guide claims it was one man, a pharmacist, who in 1794 chipped away at the tympanum with a hammer every night when he was done dispensing teas and remedies.   Doubt enters the spirit like a scrawled script. Some things only your knees will tell you. When I cried at the abbey my knees cried, too. It was that beautiful. “It is silly to hire a carriage with which not to ride to Travilles.”Restoring my seat back to an upright position, I felt I was returning from a prolonged curtsey. 

Sarah J. Sloat lives in Frankfurt, a stone’s throw from Schopenhauer’s grave. Her poems and prose have appeared in The Offing, Hayden’s Ferry Review and DMQ, among other journals. Sarah’s poetry chapbook on typefaces and texts, Inksuite, is available from Dancing Girl Press, which also published Heiress to a Small Ruin in 2016. Her twitter account is @SJSloat.