On my way to work, I passed by a day-care. | In the farmost corner of its court | a boy stood, alone, under a tree | clasping the fence so tightly | his knuckles were about to burst. | He looked at me | with the knowing desperation of the savant, | and when he saw that I had his face | he started to scream like a cat. | In thirty years, he will be a painter, a poet, | more likely, a corpse for not trying. | I won’t envy his journey but hope | he will remember how | he stood, separate from others, | in his very own circle of fire.
is the author of the poetry collection Contrapasso (Cephalopress, 2022). Her work is published in Tears in the Fence, The High Window, Feral, Gyroscope Review, Oyster River Pages, and Tokyo Poetry Journal, among others. She is mostly interested in the spaces between things, the overlooked, the unsaid.
