This selection, chosen by guest editor Sierra Farrare, is from Alone in the House of My Heart by Kari Gunter-Seymour (Ohio University Press 2022).
Do Not Disturb
Whatever it was that held mother together
all these years, is unraveling like a daytime soap opera—
turned out like the dusk of her underbed,
pacing the kitchen, hands churning air,
as if word for word was the same as moment by moment,
repetition the answer to prayer.
During the Great War, electricity was used as cure.
Volts routed through fractured cerebellums,
or directly on sectors of the body where derangements
were manifest. Those enduring matters of the heart
often undone by the overzealous.
Cracked as a broken mirror and all its mess,
her hours decline to halves, halves to minutes,
an empty frame all that remains
of the what, the where, or the not of her.
Kari Gunter-Seymour is the 2020–24 poet laureate of Ohio and the author of A Place So Deep inside America It Can’t Be Seen. A ninth-generation Appalachian, she is the editor of I Thought I Heard a Cardinal Sing: Ohio’s Appalachian Voices and the founder and host of the seasonal performance series Spoken & Heard. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, New Ohio Review, One, and numerous other publications.
Sierra Farrare is a short fiction writer from Baltimore, Maryland. In addition to a limited self-published run of her collection, Friday Night Hand Grenade, you can also find her work featured in Pretty Owl Poetry and University of Baltimore’s Welter.
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Apostasies by Holli Carrell - May 8, 2026
- The Wardrobe’s Best Dressed: Apostasies by Holli Carrell - May 7, 2026
- Sundress Reads: Review of Under The Rain - May 6, 2026