I’m covered in notes, paper scraps, jottings, so acute the letters appear about to leap off the paper’s edge. I can say things of use— I’m sometimes good for that—elsewhere is where I fall. Like a hotel across the world no longer required, three precise puffs and it drops. Touch the screen to make it implode again—a Middle Stone Age person might think like that. I think. What do I know? Crows remember the face of someone cruel. Pass the data along to the next generation. I’ll pause to let that lap at your hull. What have you told your child or dog they’ve remembered? Let’s both arrive beside a supermarket. How did you get here? How did you? We both came in cars, but we’re talking about something else. Everyone in my life flashmobs me if I step outside the house. Or it just feels that way. You request a butternut squash. I pull on my cap, get in the car, and drive to a place I believe contains butternut squash. A few pale beige bodies stacked waist-high, their handles pointing this way and that. “If they don’t have any, or they look bad, an acorn squash will do.” Every day we get out of bed, close our weary eyes, and run at the world till bed again sixteen hours later. A little honey left at the corner of our mouth.
Christopher Citro is the author of two full-length poetry books: If We Had a Lemon We'd Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015), as well as the collaboratively written poetry chapbooks: I Wear a Top Hat When I Go Into the Forest (Ghost City Press, 2025) and The Box We Put the World in to Keep a Corner From Shattering (Aureole Press, 2025). His awards include a Pushcart Prize for poetry, and his poems appear in 32 Poems, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Best New Poets, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Daily, and West Branch. His creative nonfiction appears in American Poetry Review, Boulevard, Southeast Review, Quarterly West, Passages North, and Colorado Review. Christopher is an editorial assistant for Seneca Review and lives in sunny Syracuse, New York.
