Cover designed and printed by Christopher Payne.
Jasmine Dreame Wagner is the author of Rings (Kelsey Street Press) and the chapbooks: Ask (Slope Editions), Seven Sunsets (The Lettered Streets Press), Rewilding (Ahsahta Press), and Listening for Earthquakes (Caketrain). Her poems and interviews with artists have appeared or are forthcoming in American Letters & Commentary, Colorado Review, Fence, Guernica, Hyperallergic, New American Writing, Seattle Review, and in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press). A graduate of Columbia University, Wagner has received grants and fellowships from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and The Wassaic Project. On a Clear Day, a full-length collection of lyric essays, is forthcoming from Ahsahta Press in 2017.
9 Artemis: The Knife
I was irrelevant and I didn't care.
I was as much a flower as I was a follower.
One day I'd bloom; one day I'd be fragrance.
It didn't bother me; I didn't bother me.
I didn't feel I was wrong
to speak my name or shut my trap.
How specific it felt, so here, so now—
how spectacularly sharp. This room
I offer in the abstract
before I lash out