For your cities, thank you. For yourbig noise. For the rain-glossed, thin-skinnedbags of food. For the tunnels , the candy-pink shell of your walls that we mapby feel, by oilsmear, around you, the richestplace in your house. For poison blunted,your undersink arsenal defused and deadby overuse, by you. Thank you. For youhave been the sand to your own blaze.For you have been a gentle sentinel,letting us slip in around you,cryptic, slick. This is whatwe hope you’ll take in for your pains:we’ll stay, I promise, by your sideat every step, like the gunsyou love to use till they’reempty: click click.
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- What Sparks Poetry
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Copyright © 2020 by Karen Leona Anderson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Receipt (Milkweed Editions) and Punish honey (Carolina Wren). Her work has most recently appeared in Epiphany, Pleiades, Little Star, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, The Best American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies; her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Grant. She is a professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Spring / Summer 2020
New York, New York
Publisher
Willard Cook
Editor-in-Chief
Sara Lippmann
Managing Editor
Heather Gluck
Epiphany is a semiannual print and online publication and independent nonprofit 501(c)(3) that supports practicing writers at every stage of their careers.
For over 20 years we have championed work that transcends convention and demonstrates literary mastery. We publish two print magazines a year and publish essays, fiction, and poetry online on a rolling basis. With our Breakout contest and Fresh Voices Fellowship we honor both student writers and writers of color who exist outside the literary establishment. We have published generation-defining voices over the years, including Jamel Brinkley, Jennifer Egan, Lydia Davis, Sara Ahmed, Elena Ferrante, Robert Pinsky, Fanny Howe, and Rae Armantrout, and we are proud to always pay our contributors and editors.
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