Face-up underwater gazing up bright, the rippled
branches were always more mesmerizing in motion
or twisted light like the outline of your face
as the windows fade and the walls cave into
something blurry, insignificant. Take me to the location
where my name dizzies in your air and we don’t need
signposts or general stores or bus fares. We are building
an aftertaste in electrical wires, we are
building what the crickets will sing to your hands.
Emma DePanise’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as River Styx, The Minnesota Review, The National Poetry Review, Passages North, Quarterly West and elsewhere. She is a winner of a 2019 AWP Intro Journals Award and the 2018 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is currently an MFA candidate in poetry at Purdue University, a poetry editor for Sycamore Review and a co-editor of The Shore Poetry.
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