For your cities, thank you. For yourbig noise. For the rain-glossed, thin-skinnedbags of food. For the tunnels , the candy-pink shell of your walls that we mapby feel, by oilsmear, around you, the richestplace in your house. For poison blunted,your undersink arsenal defused and deadby overuse, by you. Thank you. For youhave been the sand to your own blaze.For you have been a gentle sentinel,letting us slip in around you,cryptic, slick. This is whatwe hope you’ll take in for your pains:we’ll stay, I promise, by your sideat every step, like the gunsyou love to use till they’reempty: click click.
Feature Date
- April 3, 2023
Series
- What Sparks Poetry
Selected By
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Copyright © 2020 by Karen Leona Anderson.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Karen Leona Anderson is the author of the poetry collections Receipt (Milkweed Editions) and Punish honey (Carolina Wren). Her work has most recently appeared in Epiphany, Pleiades, Little Star, Alaska Quarterly Review, ZYZZYVA, The Best American Poetry, and other journals and anthologies; her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Grant. She is a professor of English at St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
Spring / Summer 2020
New York, New York
Publisher
Willard Cook
Editor-in-Chief
Noreen Tomassi
Managing Editor
Miracle Jones
Epiphany is a semiannual print and online literary journal.
Our name derives from the Joycean idea that an epiphany is the moment when “the soul of the commonest object… seems to us radiant.” Like the semicolon in our logo, an epiphany is a pause followed by a shift. Like the semicolon, an epiphany can consist of a confluence between two ideas. Like the semicolon, an epiphany is both a part of language and outside of it.
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