- If there’s a box on stage, it’s the woman who disappears or gets cut in half. Hard to slip into that glove.
- Turn the box on its side. The rhymes unsettle, waving in the air. Then there’s a pair of us!/ Don’t tell!
- A dozen lines fragile as eggs. A couplet like the topper on a wedding cake.
- Can we make a cat’s cradle to spring us into the air? I have to unclip my brain, let it fly out of my skull like the silent butler my mother used to have with its lid and handle of brass.
- I was disguised as a pretty girl. The shapes a bright container can contain!
- A woman has a form but not the same. See brassiere. See razors and stalkings. Use panty girdle as a verb.
- One two three four/ I declare a quatrain war. Rock paper sestet.
- I was 14 once. I will not be again. You can’t put an orange back in its peel.
- Wanda Coleman. Courtly love. E-f-g-e-f-g.
- A poem is more like a string. Each pulling a cloud. Wash day. I’m clipping things up even though there’s a dryer inside. The wind shudders a shirt. Flaps a brassy pillowcase. Lines of rope. Lines. Bodied out and falling away.
- Half-slip. Every line an earthquake. Wilderness. Put a zip-line in this poem.
- Eight days of rain and something’s rushing along in the river.
- If there’s a net. If you’re standing out in the foam. Try and grab it like a fish with as much success. Two things brought together, a few dark splashes of light because it’s spring and the water’s cold and it all passes by so fast it can’t be said.
Susan Grimm has been published in Sugar House Review, The Cincinnati Review, Phoebe, and Field. Her chapbook Almost Home was published in 1997. In 2004, BkMk Press published Lake Erie Blue, a full-length collection. In 2010, she won the inaugural Copper Nickel Poetry Prize. In 2011, she won the Hayden Carruth Poetry Prize and her chapbook Roughed Up by the Sun’s Mothering Tongue was published. In 2022, she received her third Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Grant.
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