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Pandemic Haibun

by Stephanie Lane Sutton

I greet the sun squinting in the morning as my dog squats 

on a leash & it is not the first wince of the day: again, woke

in a room splayed open by light, gazed toward a dream, 

half-remembered. In another room, I stretch my fat 

against muscle & bone & hope my abdomen 

will ache like a faultline ripped open by friction

by this time tomorrow & by this time tomorrow

I will have lived another day between two boulders 

smashing together, my head being squished 

like the object of some child’s play in perspective.

By now you are the cliff I throw myself from. 

Arrival is obliteration. You, a fisherman, hook

snared in my lips you refuse to tug. Wither my flesh

to froth on the waves that claim my body, lap by lap. 

            Like ghosts, the crests

            dissolve into sand, dividing

            the sky from the land. 


Stephanie Lane Sutton was born in Detroit. Her writing has appeared in in
The Adroit Journal, Anmly Lit, Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Rhino
Poetry, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. Her micro-chapbook, ‘Shiny
Insect Sex,’ is part of the Bull City Press Inch Series. She received a
creative writing MFA from the University of Miami, where she was the
managing editor of Sinking City. You can find her doing live interactive
writing on Twitch as @AthenaSleepsIn.

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