​FAIREST OF THE FAIR - Sara Sams

When the internet preacher
tells me I am “not depressed”
because I am “a child of god,”

I can see him make his move
against me. He would have me
on the beauty pulpit saying

I am not a slut, I am a Slut
           of Creation!
RIP, slut is a look— I flush
​
my cheeks with candy apple
             and a worm spits out.
I slip into a spandex suit

and hardened sacks push
            out my breastbone.
These botched balloons

my sponsors counseled
are not the only marks
against me: I ask the judges to

“consider the benefits
of sexual education” and the distance
between us elongates, drips

its evidence of a cum-wet
cock. Listen, I hate the word cum
and I don’t love the word cock--

such fucking fanfare--
but I’ve emphasized both for you
so you can see how willing

I am to hold a word; meanwhile,
the meanest of the three judges
sits there, scratching his moral

junk and his clean-shaven bib.
We all of us at the fair know
that what was tumbling forth

from the fair was always
the creation of more sluts.
The curtain drops, concessions

close, and the preacher fakes
his interest in my wellbeing.
Looking sorry in my direction,

he whispers to his buddy,
get her in the pickup ‘n
we’ll see how she does, then--

she, plastered with vicious
stickers, the your hole
is my goal She— the Jo & The Ho

gotta go She; She, axle-backed,
She—really, who better
than She to promote

agricultural fairness
in the great state of
the same old damage She,

the “is and always has
been” a “she,” nonpartisan in
her idealessness, sashable

and unflinching in the face
of thoracic compression,
constant in that

her voice is
constant-snuffed into
aftermarket motors.



Sara Sams is a writer from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. She currently works as an Assistant Professor in the University of Arizona’s Creative Writing program. Her first book of poems, Atom City, has been described by poet Cynthia Hogue as a collection that “documents government duplicity and the revisionist history of developing the atomic bomb” and by poet Diana Marie Delgado as “brilliant debut collection, [in which] she proves herself to be a poet of immense personal and historical depth.”