Editor's Prize Winner | June 02, 2021
Poems: Chelsea B. DesAutels
Chelsea B. DesAutels
Maybe You Need to Write a Poem About Mercy
after Robert Hass
Start this one with the woman standing at the edge
of the woods. Or the desert, it doesn’t matter,
what matters is she’s standing under a darkening sky
and she knows, at this point, having spent months
in the hospital, that there’s nothing she can do—
no threshold between threat and tranquility,
no demarcation she can draw around herself
for her child for protection, everything is actually
everything else, the stone just kicked
and whatever comes next are the same.
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