Sara Martin takes a seat in the courtyard at the Fine Arts Work Center and turns her face toward the sun. It’s just past 2 p.m.

“Two p.m. is a demonic time of day,” says Martin, a second-year writing fellow at FAWC. During her first fellowship, in 2018, she wrote a novel in verse called They Wake Up Swinging — it turned out to be “a hard sell,” she says. A 50-page excerpt was published in The Seattle Review in April 2018.

This time around, she’s working on The Mid, a book that meditates on the hour of 2 p.m., which Martin calls “the hole in the day.” Through the hole is “how the demons get in,” she says with authority. The Mid is a narrative in the form of a lyric essay: Martin’s tone is conversational but elusive, her metaphors outrageous, delicate, and transcendent by turns.

A poem about the morning is an aubade. A nighttime poem is a nocturne. But there’s no name for middle-of-the-day poetry, Martin says. “Let’s call them Mids,” she writes on the first page of her book.

Two in the afternoon “is overthinking the thoughts you aren’t having,” Martin writes. “It is the interruption of someone saying life is short while another is saying life is long.”

Two p.m. is “defined by not knowing what to do,” says Martin. “It’s sort of like insomnia, but you’re not even trying to sleep. It’s watching your neighbor’s TV through their window.” It isn’t limited to its hour, either. “It’s a state of mind,” she says. “You can be inside 2 p.m. at any time of day.”

Martin loves the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch, who died in 1516. “I’ve developed a theory that all of his paintings occur at 2 p.m.,” she says. The works — populated by people and demons, surreal and nightmarish — are desperate, she says, “like 2 p.m.” One, called Cutting the Stone — also known as The Extraction of the Stone of Madness — shows a surgeon extracting something from a man’s skull. The patient has his eyes open. “This is the kind of thing you would do at 2 p.m. if you could do anything,” Martin writes in The Mid.

She says she wasn’t a particularly good student early on. But in third grade, she was introduced to poetry, a form that was “wild and unpredictable.” She saw the way her thoughts appeared and the way she wrote in her journal reflected in the sheer drops of poetic line breaks.

“Poetry is an inherently human thing,” Martin says. “I think that some people deeply feel it before they even know what it is.” For her, “poetry was a pathway to liking school.”

Martin went to Boston College and then the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, from which she graduated in 2013. She moved to New Orleans and took the first job that was offered to her, at a donut shop called Wink’s in the French Quarter. It was “the best job I’ve ever had,” says Martin. “The shop was really unpopular. I could read behind the counter for hours. I think I read everything John Updike ever wrote.”

Martin has also worked in marine debris removal, libraries, urban farming, pet insurance investigation, and reptile care. “Reptile care is something I will never do again,” she says.

Two years ago, Martin had a job giving tours of the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, a decommissioned 19th-century prison. “The job was such a Mid,” she writes.

Death is something Martin has been pondering. Specifically, she says, “What’s the deal with cremation?” She began interviewing people for a video project on cremation as a reflection of our inclination to “avert our eyes from death.” Much of that work will be published in August in The Drift, a literary magazine. During the first half of her FAWC fellowship, Martin also wrote a “mockumentary-style” play based on her experiences, called Hot Corpse.

“Cremation has this way of shrinking the body,” says Martin, “making it something dry, making it something that fits in a little cup.” Cremation is a “messy middle,” she says, between the preservative, conservative ideas of the past and whatever belief system will emerge next.

Scattering ashes is almost like performing a spell, says Martin — an action that expresses “a desire to believe in something.” The dust is buried or planted or flung into the sea. To become ash is a flexible arrangement, says Martin. It suits everyone.

In her research, Martin says, she’s been a “death tourist,” lingering on the sidelines of funeral directors’ conventions, visiting mortuary schools and crematoriums and perusing urn catalogs. “Funeral directors have an amazing sense of humor,” she says.

“It’s all been one big 2 p.m.” says Martin about her tourism. Every 24 hours, when 2 p.m. arrives, “you become aware of the death of day. It’s not quite there, but you’re waiting for it.”

During her seven months — an amount of time she calls “such a Mid” — in Provincetown, Martin spent two months volunteering at the Lily House in Wellfleet, a community hospice-care facility. Her shift was from 2 to 4 p.m. a couple of days a week.

“I realized that hospices are Mids,” says Martin. But the Lily House might be different. It’s not that 2 p.m. is irrevocably dark, she says. “You just need to know how to cultivate it. You have to take care of it.”

The Lily House, tucked between tupelos, is “the best version” of a Mid, says Martin. There, she believes, people face the Mid and know exactly what to do.

Martin loves 2 p.m. “for its audacity” and “because no one else will.” When the dreadful hour strikes each day, when she’s not sitting for an interview in the sun or navigating 2 p.m.’s nowhere-ness in her writing, she says her usual remedy is simple: “Yoga.”