Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
KT Herr
2025 Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Finalist
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On salvation
If you want to learn to save the world, you have to save it all: not just the five parrots at the zoo, separated for conspiring to swear at tourists, but the tourists, too—and the lady with the Judy Blue jeans, and the one with the Cakes nipple covers—grippy, not sticky!—the one whose disembodied hands mash raw burger into the bottom of a pan, and the one who stands off to the side, ooing and ahhing. You have to save whatever engineer invented that one AI voice you always associate with your middle school bully. You know the one. And you have to save your middle school bully, too, wherever she is, and you have to save the voice, even if you don’t know what that means. You have to save the zoo administrator who quarantined the parrots; and you have to save his sister, who voted for Jill Stein. You have to save Jill Stein. You have to save everyone who worked for her campaign—for any campaign—and those filthy freaks behind the scenes, greasing the wheels. You have to save the wheels, even when they churn out horror instead of humor; prisons instead of parrots; bombs instead of blue jeans. I don’t make the rules, I just play by them. But you know, if we do decide to save it all, we should sit down and have a long talk about the bombs.
Bio Copy here
