HOLD EVERYTHING
Hold everything with an open palm: the spoon
to stir sugar in morning coffee, the morning,
especially work that follows morning.
Hold everything with an open palm: the face
of someone you greet, the cat before feeding,
washing your own face over the bathroom sink.
It will occur to you an open palm holds nothing,
which is why, this morning I slip into my pocket
a gravel my daughter assures me fell from the moon.
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RACHEL MORGAN is the Assistant Poetry Editor for the North American Review and teaches creative writing at the University of Northern Iowa. She’s a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She co-edited Fire Under the Moon: An Anthology of Contemporary Slovene Poetry (Black Dirt Press). Recently her work appears or is forthcoming in Crazyhorse, Fence, Denver Quarterly, Barely South, Hunger Mountain, and DIAGRAM.
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Read more by Rachel Morgan
Poem in South85 Journal
Poem in DIAGRAM
Poem in Barely South Review
Author’s website