Another Way to Say Divorce

by Kelli Russell Agodon

At the grocery store, the woman told her children, I’m selling daddy to the circus. But what she meant to say was that his eyes were the color of tigers, the color of the flaming rings he tried to make her jump through.

Box Where Four Women Look in Opposite Directions

by Kelli Russell Agodon

It’s not a sunset, but the earth turning away from a star. Behind walls, we cultivate love. There’s always a little sadness in empty bottles. The woman to my left is ripping up the directions. The woman to my right has glued a map onto her life. We are hungry and time is running out. In every disaster, there is a purple flower that survives. Sometimes what grows is a memory, a thread of self we once were. Sometimes we wear an old shirt and come unsewn.

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Kelli Russell Agodon is a bi/queer poet and editor from the Pacific Northwest. Her newest book, Dialogues with Rising Tides (Copper Canyon Press) was named a Finalist in the Washington State Book Awards and shortlisted for the Eric Hoffer Book Award Grand Prize in Poetry. She is the cofounder of Two Sylvias Press and teaches at Pacific Lutheran University's low-res MFA program, the Rainier Writing Workshop. She is also the author of Demystifying the Manuscript: Essays and Interviews on Creating a Book of Poems, which she co-edited with Susan Rich. agodon.com / twosylviaspress.com

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