I put on my face. This one is wolfish. Never, upon waking, have I been so empty
forever, days are not a stretch of water like it is tonight—the motel room
propped up and grinning. As my body too casts up narrow beams on the ceiling, a
freezing in their gravity. When we kissed it was two swordfish, vaulting--
Ah, be with me always, spirit of noisy windbreak for the gray-white fires of ghosts.
Sources: Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno, Frances Justine Post, Arielle Greenberg, Lisa C. Kreuger, Christina Olson, Michael Hettich, Sharon Olds, Jennifer K. Sweeney, Bianca Stone, Frank O’Hara, Richard Kenney
-- Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis is the author of Intaglio (Kent State University Press, 2006), winner of the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize, and The Rub, awarded the Elixir Press Editors’ Prize and published in 2014. She teaches at Columbus College of Art and Design where she is the faculty advisor for Botticelli Literary/Art Magazine.
Stephanie Rogers was educated at The Ohio State University, the University of Cincinnati, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as Tin House, Ploughshares, Pleiades, upstreet, New OhioReview, and The Adroit Journal, as well as the Best New Poets anthology. Her first collection of poems, Plucking the Stinger, was published by Saturnalia Books.