And with the new organizational systemfor the closets we’re finally going to getour act together. I’m not looking so I’m notseeing all the good stuff—my stuff—you’rethrowing out in ways that make you feelbetter and lighter and like you’re livingthe right life and which make me a littlesad because it’s just more of things goingaway never to return and if I get any lighterI won’t even be able to stay here on this planet.I barely feel like I can right now, which iswhy I love trees and dead cars in driveways.We kept them on the edge of our driveway.I don’t know what the neighbors thoughtand I don’t care. I knocked a window outby accident (sort of) playing with a slingshotI shouldn’t have. I snuck into my bedroomwhen no one was looking and pretendedI’d been there all day. I lived in fear andwhen nothing happened I stopped living in fear—at least about that window. We taped it upand on summer afternoons I’d lay acrossthe back seat reading novels listening tothe rain on the roof and basically what I’msaying is do what you want with the closets.I don’t care. But if you see me later at theside of the house going through the trashit’s because when I went to pull it downthe drive it felt so unusually heavy. I thoughtthere might be a body in there. Maybe mine.
Sneaking Back Inside
Feature Date
- May 4, 2023
Series
Selected By
Share This Poem
Print This Poem
“Sneaking Back Inside” from IF WE HAD A LEMON WE’D THROW IT AND CALL THAT THE SUN: by Christopher Citro.
Published by Elixir Press on April 1, 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Christopher Citro.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.
Christopher Citro is the author of If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call That the Sun (Elixir Press, 2021), winner of the 2019 Antivenom Poetry Award, and The Maintenance of the Shimmy-Shammy (Steel Toe Books, 2015). His honors include a 2018 Pushcart Prize for poetry, a 2019 fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation, Columbia Journal‘s poetry award, and a creative nonfiction award from The Florida Review. His poetry appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Best New Poets 2014, Crazyhorse, Denver Quarterly, Gulf Coast, Iowa Review, Narrative, Pleiades, Ploughshares, West Branch, and elsewhere. His creative nonfiction appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, American Poetry Review, Bellingham Review, Boulevard, Colorado Review, The Florida Review, Passages North, Quarterly West, The Southeast Review, and elsewhere. Christopher lives in Syracuse, New York.
Minneapolis, Minnesota
If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call that the Sun by Christopher Citro was chosen by Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis as the winner of the 2019 Elixir Press Antivenom Poetry Award.
Lee Upton had this to say about it: "In Christopher Citro's If We Had a Lemon We’d Throw It and Call that the Sun, the kinetic, continually surprising lines of poems contend with the largest questions. The poem title 'An Emergency Every Day of the Week' suggests the sense of threat that veers through these poems in the midst of their bracing comic energy. For Citro, so much depends on the angle at which we view our experiences. Musing on our daily disarrangements and the ways we attempt to lower the temperature on our worry barometers, he makes wildly inventive, exciting, vital poems, working sideways to reveal what we really ought to see at last."
Poetry Daily Depends on You
With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.
