From the neck up, it has all the charm of your high school principal, with his resting expression of placid WTF. The red eyes give him away. He knows the students’ self-absorption, and each morning as he puts on his brown suit he longs to one day be his real self, to don the white silk stockings and pink and red swirly skirt that he hides in his closet in his oldest garment bag, tucked behind the cheap sports jackets and the rack of garish ties in which he pretends to pretend to be hip.

Ann Quinn

is a poet, editor, teacher, mentor, mother, and classical clarinetist. Her award-winning work has been published in Poet Lore, Potomac Review, Little Patuxent Review, Broadkill Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Haibun Today, and Snapdragon, and is included in the anthology Red Sky: Poetry on the Global Epidemic of Violence Against Women.

Her chapbook, Final Deployment, is published by Finishing Line Press, and a book co-written with one of her long-running classes, Poetry is Life, is now available from Yellow Arrow Publishing. She teaches poetry courses via Zoom for Yellow Arrow and the Writer’s Center in Bethesda and is the poetry editor for Yellow Arrow Journal. Ann holds an M.F.A. in poetry from Pacific Lutheran University and lives in Catonsville, Maryland with her family.

Visit her at: https://www.annquinn.net