Possible responses include: vague extended apologies for my comfort or my government, details of dystopian nightmares complete with sharp rusted metal and unbroken screams, below-the-desk nuclear-winter fears from seventh…

  There’s no running from our sorrow . . . from his grip, as he drags us into the nearest war. No running from his fingers, molding us like snowballs…

  Don’t rub me wrong, I season, I sting, cause tears, I am made from tears, taste of sorrow craved. Do not rub me into wounds, don’t love me too…

  We walk with a hunch. Women with loose jaws, big thighs and sharp beaks. We walk complete. We put Parachute oil in our hair and rub Zandu Balm on…

  Let’s say you wake up unhaunted seeing everything in your home Sun cracks your curtains from just the right angle Every floorboard is perfectly clean you can’t find anything…

  Point of order, Emily has caught up with the last five years of Emily poems. She spent the last four months reading at least sixty poems where she is…

  I’m on fire for being whatever she wants Ohio to be. I ran out of money in the first Ohio. So, I’m going to have to learn another way…

  When I first looked I felt buoyed—the white mass a midline, a belly, an open heart, a delicate basket, bellows expanded, or I saw a dancing figure at the…

  We fished at the Florida cattle pond for green-tinted bass— buzz baits skittered along the lily pads before the heat arrived. My father held to his corner. I circled…

  Do you remember the fig tree? All girls of a certain age read that chapter and cried. I look at you and can’t see what the world does. We’re…

  A crosshatched cloud drops like a split-fingered fastball. When I enter the cold the grackles find me, spitting the sound of their name in iron. On this forgotten holiday…

  Beet juice, that’s what your mother used to dye your hair that summer. I thought she would choose something different, something special, the fur of a red panda, her…