Sophie Klahr

The poem "During House Arrest" by sophie klahr: During house arrest, the angel discovers the limits of a window: parole allows a few hours each week—a trip to the graveyard, to the dispensary. When I visit, we lean together out the attic’s window into the spring air. There is no room in my dream for anyone else, the angel warns, and touches my back. On TV, an evangelical station: We must decide, the preacher says, where faith begins. It must begin within our own four walls. On another channel, a man finds a portal: his infinite selves are seeable; in this episode, he is saving a friend with wings from his own memory, cursing him, asking Isn’t it enough to say I love you? jesus fucking christ.... the angel switches to another channel, this time a mummy movie— they’re all the same, the angel says, someone is always sacrificed. At sunset, we climb out the window and scale the steep roof to the peak as we might have when we met as children. As if we have infinite selves and these bodies are just one version in which we’ve survived. The angel asks me again to stay and I think of how many meanings stay can hold—one can be said to stay hunger, to hold it. Some nights I stay until the angel falls asleep. Some nights I stay the night.
The poem "The Archer" by sophie klahr: The angel is strongly considering the abandonment of all human language. Sometimes, I screenshot his stories: [cursing the fat of a lawyer—you owe what you can’t afford to pay—typed in caps over a cop car in flames] [a quote from Revelations, a bodybuilder’s testimony ] [anime girl with breasts leaking milk-pearls; GIF of a spinning stone cherub ] Here: a suburban arsenal; here: YouTubes of conspiracies proved. He pulls away the edge of his attic’s oriental carpet, practices throwing a knife into the wooden floor again and again like punctuation. His fistful of memes like a callous. Like a watch. When you’re not here, the angel says, you’re just missing. It seems an endless winter—some poorly remembered translation of Euripides, a treatise on palimpsest. A sacred heart hums on the angel’s spine. The more time I spend with the angel, the more weight I lose. A jellyfish swims only by contraction and muscle, a body branching out from its center like spokes in a wheel. How does it go—“When a good man is hurt, all who would be called good must suffer with him.” The house arrest phone rings and goes unanswered, except by the angel’s curses—he is busy with his drawer of supplement powders. A world that gets abandoned catches fire, says the angel, it comes for what abandoned it.

From the author: It’s no secret that American law enforcement is sometimes enacted haphazardly, and that sometimes — more often than we’d like to admit — courts support the claims and actions of officers at the cost of the well-being of citizens. Particularly if the citizen in question is an addict and/or mentally ill and/or could be identified as a minority and/or has had a prior conviction, even for something as victimless as trespassing.. The system over-punishes like clockwork.

These poems are from a long series which recount and reflect a true story; at this time of writing these poems, my friend was on house arrest. Now, he is in jail. 
 

Sophie Klahr is the author of Two Open Doors in a Field (University of Nebraska Press) and Meet Me Here at Dawn (YesYes Books), and co-author of There Is Only One Ghost in the World (Fiction Collective Two), which won the 2022 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize. Her writing appears in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Her online classes and literary editing services can be found at sophieklahr.com . She lives in Los Angeles.