Issue 3.1
Winter 2023
Dawn Tefft
Reflection
I was reading All Our Yesterdays, a novel written about everyday life during fascist Italy as the war came on. I was thinking about how even in the most extreme of times, the everyday is all there is. There is no getting around it or outside of it: even extremes are made up of drudgery and little pieces of time stitched together. If we are very studious, we try to pay attention to
the stitching.
How Do I Tell You Where I Come From?
When you’ll be more like the girls
I thought I hated
​
the ones who were two-story houses with garages and five pairs of jeans
Will loving me be enough
​
to see the food stamp weather moving across my geography
roaches crawling inside my mouth
and my books all falling open
to no nights at the dollar show
When my eyelids close, will you see a film projected
of an engine
hoisted up on a chain slung over a tree branch
a body slinking out of a red Vega
with a scavenged orange hood
trying not to be seen
at the high school
Will you hear the waves in my ears
pounding my mother’s untreated yeast infections
into a lyric
​
and my brother’s payday loans
and my other brother’s jail stints
and
Or will I have to show you the actual poem
that says
“I was the maid's room
pretending not to know the gratuitous
nature of the maid's room
my own mother, a kitchen”
​
then leave you to your best guesses
and any homework you give yourself
to puzzle out where you fit in the poem that ends
​
“and we rise slowly”
Dawn's Book Recommendations
​
Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Snow Part by Paul Celan
shattered sonnets love cards and other off and back handed importunities by Olena Kalytiak Davis
Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward
Dawn Tefft's poems appear in Denver Quarterly, Fence, and Sentence. Her chapbooks include Fist (Dancing Girl Press) and Field Trip to My Mother and Other Exotic Locations (Mudlark). She earned a PhD in Creative Writing at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, volunteers as an editor for Packingtown Review, and lives and works in Chicago. She is an intentionally single parent.