Stephanie Ford
ARMED INTRUDER DRILL
Girls, the softer season is over
and I, too, have been lazy,
only lowering myself—in the future
we’re here to hope we’ll reach—
to pull my son’s favorite weed, polygonum,
which is pink, and rather pretty, and scatters
tiny round seeds at a touch. Even here,
crouched between slim metal legs
machined by a different kind of prisoner,
I imagine I’m free to imagine the world
is mine to survive, as those crows now gather
their thousand minds, and rise,
a great flock of targets.
STEPHANIE FORD is the author of All Pilgrim (Four Way). Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, Fence, and Tin House. She lives in Pittsburgh.
ISSUE FOUR features fiction by David Crouse, Susan Daitch, JoAnna Novak, and Ian Stansel; literary criticism by Rick Moody; film writing by J.M. Tyree; creative nonfiction by Michael Levan and Marco Wilkinson; film writing by J.M. Tyree; a David Remnick interview with John Ashbery; poetry by Natalie Eilbert, Kathy Fagan, Sarah Gridley, Philip Metres, Danielle Pafunda, Daniel Poppick, Zachary Schomburg, Sandra Simonds, Analicia Sotelo, and Catherine Wagner; and translations of Jorge Luis Borges and Ye Hui.