insomnia
as i rolled over
my mind flung up flowers
Poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2025, Action, Spectacle, The American Poetry Review, The New Statesman, AGNI online, OVS (who nominated my poem for a Pushcart prize), Cream City Review, Arsenic Lobster, LA Review, lyric, Cider Press Review, Natural Bridge, Atlanta Review, Pedestal Magazine, Chiron Review, yefief, Diner, Great River Review
in the unlikely event
the deep notes land like wind on sea
which is to say they don't
because water is not a landable place
everything repeats
everything repeats
the heart can rest on this
- it does
MY LIFE IS BRILLIANT
No one I love
has died so far today
every single war in the world
has passed me by
I am not starving and I haven't stumbled
onto any terrorist's map
or into anyone's axis of evil
nobody tortured me today
no policeman shot me by accident or on purpose
no tidal wave swept my house away
I was not sentenced to death for infidelity
blasphemy, murder
or not putting enough salt in the soup
'An Urgent Request' by Sarah Luczaj (Fortunate Daughter, 2009)
Creative regeneration works from 4 basic principles: 1. there’s a natural state and it feels good. It’s characterised by bliss, and power, the kind that you can feel running like a current underneath other less pleasant emotions. It feels good simply to be alive. You feel energy and agency, you feel fed and resourced and able to give. The natural state isn’t just individual bliss. Its essence is compassion. Your needs are simply not cordoned off from the needs of other people, animals, plants, or the whole eco-system. This isn’t an abstract world view. As indigenous people understand, damaging what we call ‘the environment’ is like cutting off your own arm, or choking yourself. It’s a practical approach to life. The natural state isn’t an attainment, or an achievement to be worked for, or awarded. It’s the baseline. It’s your birthright. It’s a necessity for us all.
Creative Regeneration, Sarah Luczaj (Wayward Publications, 2019)
In Senses of Focusing (eds Nikolaos Kypriotakis & Judy Moore (Eurasia, 2022) ‘Focusing is not a Thing’ by Sarah Luczaj
What do we mean when we say ‘thing’?
A thing is characterised by being boundaried, having a particular identity, name and set of defining characteristics which separate it from other things, hence it has some kind of solidity and unchangingness in its nature. According to Gendlin’s Process Model, however, as well as much of Eastern philosophy, isolated ‘things’ cannot, ultimately, exist.
