it felt like every person in the video was swimming.a person was swimming. a video was swimming.a person in a video was swimmingand the remote controls were growing out of the water.it was like everyone in the video was being sewnor standing next to someone who was sewing.an organization is not a task that can be accomplished.a task is a task that takes no timebut offers every solution.a shape is proximal to its axes.that is the beauty of shapes.we can stand very still next to them.there’s still time to iron a perfect hem,to press the daffodils carefully into the kitchen sink with water,to show other people how to speak to horses.you do it mostly with your eyes and ears.you do it mostly while standing at a distance.when it rains at a university it is an indoor sort of rain.that is to say, it makes the shape of rain without actually raining.
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Excerpt from Groceries: by Nora Claire Miller.
Published by Fonograf on October 21, 2025.
Copyright © 2025 by Nora Claire Miller.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Nora Claire Miller is a writer and multi-disciplinary artist. Their debut poetry book Groceries won the Fonograf Editions Open Genre Contest, judged by Srikanth Reddy, and will be released October 21 2025. Nora’s poems and essays have recently appeared in The Paris Review, Chicago Review, and Bennington Review.
Nora is from NYC and is based in Western Massachusetts, where they’re the editor-in-chief of Ghost Proposal and the founder and director of Somehow School for Young Writers. They have an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop & a BA from Hampshire College.
The winner of the 2023 Fonograf Editions Open Genre Book Prize contest, as chosen by Srikanth Reddy, Groceries is a book-length poem about what to do about objects. Not where to put them exactly, but how to print them out from the sky so they get sucked back down to earth. How to tell a noun from a category of noun, an image from a category of image. Cereal from USB ports. Motorcycles from escalators. Grapevines from hair elastics. They’re more similar than you’d think.
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