Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
Signed Out
Traveling by cycle
with a pack of lies, dogs
at her throat. Someone told
her to sign out. She didn’t
have time to stop the voices
pressing her to split. She sure
as hell wouldn’t miss a blast
like that, shoes kicked off,
no rain check, no five minute
check. So what if the padded
cell of her mind caved?
She didn’t care
if you called
her. Alice was
gone.
Elizabeth Rees is the author of Every Root a Branch (Codhill Press, 2014) and three chapbooks: Tilting Gravity, winner of the Codhill Chapbook Award; Now That We’re Here, winner of the Spire Press Chapbook Prize; and Balancing China, which won the Sow’s Ear Poetry Review Chapbook Prize. She was a finalist for Nimrod‘s 2018 Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her poetry has appeared in The Southern Review, Prairie Schooner, AGNI, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing and literature at Macalester College, Boston College, Boston University, the U.S. Naval Academy, and Johns Hopkins University. In addition, she has served as a consulting writer and editor to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Smithsonian Museums’ Travelling Exhibitions, and PBS. She works as a poet-in-the-schools for the Maryland State Arts Council and conducts poetry workshops for adults at The Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. (updated 10/2018)