Cynthia Barounis is working toward her PhD in English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Salzburg Review and is forthcoming in Partner Dance Press's 21/21/Chicago anthology.
Claire Leeds lives and works on a farm in southern Wisconsin, holds a BA in Creative Writing and is currently working toward a BS in Nursing.
Because The Poem is a Limited Resource
I’ll ration stanzas like canned
meat during wartime; exhaust
verse to vapor, fume enough to keep
this engine plotting A to B, B to C,
C to D, origin to peak; nothing
metaphoric about our destination
but what propels us toward it
is the chemistry of conversion:
a stake drilled into the lawn distills
into the anchor of a compass;
leashed dog orbits like graphite,
carves with her body the edge
of a perfect circle,
a flattened globe, the rounded lip
of a glass from above;
the memory of scotch on my breath;
when this fuel runs out, I won’t drive
home, but bury my keys in the earth
and wait to see what grows there.