Current
Issue
Volume 12.2
Maria S. Picone
—
By the corner of the Emerson Tatte near the Commons
-for J.A.
You hand me a thoughtful bottle of water your fingers circle like a napkin ring.
The city chews its food, spitting rain remnants on cobblestones.
You ask about my train. They let us in the institution. With commentary.
We sit on a high floor that shows the Hub’s inner spokes. Its spirals in stone.
You tell me my dream job’s not what you thought it would be.
For the first half of class, I sit in the back like a late student.
I flash back to entering a square stack of classrooms.
You are a great MC. I take notes, hope it lasts.
The shade cast by the classroom projector is its own solace.
They’ve changed university bathrooms to offer dignity and solitude.
On request, I read that poem I thought no one noticed. I feel seen.
The golden dome in the Departed has its own teleology.
When hands eject the safety of their bodies, my heart thrills.
They have questions for me.
Maria S. Picone/수영 (mariaspicone.com; @mspicone) is a queer Korean American adoptee who has three chapbooks: Anti Asian Bias, Adoptee Song (Game Over Books), This Tenuous Atmosphere (Conium). She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Reckoning, and others including Best Small Fictions 2021. She won Salamander’s Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Prize, Cream City Review’s 2020 Poetry Prize, and support from Kenyon Review, Juniper, McCormack (fka Tin House), Hambidge, The Watering Hole, South Carolina Arts Commission, South Arts, and elsewhere. She edits at Chestnut Review, Five Minutes, and Foglifter.
