Rationale

Chloe Martinez

Because she still won't sleep alone, you sleep deeplywith her small warm body wrapped in your arms.Because it won't always be so, you let it be like this.In the night you wake and read Ferrante again, your devicegiving just enough light in the dark. Because you were waitingfor something, something came to you, despite recent despair,despite your intermittent rages. Because you were in need.Because the world seems to be ending more than usual.Because your child in one of her fits flailed an arm,broke a glass all over the supermarket floor, stood aloneby a case of cured meats, weeping, refusing comfort,watched by worried passersby. Because you were in need,the dawn came: those colors, why even try to describeall the colors? And the sea rising darkly to meet them—

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Black and white headshot of Chloe Martinez

Chloe Martinez is a poet, a translator, and a scholar of South Asian religions. She is the author of the collection Ten Thousand Selves and the chapbook Corner Shrine. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, POETRY, Prairie Schooner, Agni and elsewhere, and her translations have been awarded the Anne Frydman Prize and the Willis Barnstone Prize. She works at Claremont McKenna College.

Cover of Southern Humanities Review 57.1

57.1

Auburn, Alabama

Auburn University

Editors
Anton DiSclafani, Rose McLarney

Managing Editor
Caitlin Rae Taylor

Poetry Editor
Rose McLarney

Southern Humanities Review is the literary quarterly published from the Department of English at Auburn University in Auburn, Alabama. Founded in 1967, SHR publishes fiction, nonfiction, and poetry.

Work published in Southern Humanities Review is considered for Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, Best American Short Stories, New Stories from the South, Prize Stories: O. Henry Awards, and the Pushcart Prize.

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