This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Animal Unfit by Megan Nichols (Belle Point Press 2023).
My Child is Young and We Have Loved Ones Who are Alive
Future me will mourn these years
with such ferocity that the anguish
will travel back in time to rest atop
my joy, a lead pebble in my heart.
Megan Nichols lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Iron Horse Literary Review, The Threepenny Review, Frontier Poetry and elsewhere. She was a finalist for Write Bloody’s 2021 Jack McCarthy Book Prize, named a Spring 2022 Brooklyn Poets Fellow, and serves as a poetry reader for Variant Literature and River Mouth Review.
L.M. Cole is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bulb Culture Collective whose writing and art have been published with The Pinch Journal, The McNeese Review, Five South, The Dodge, and many other excellent journals and magazines. She can be found on Twitter @_scoops__ and more of her work can be found at linktr.ee/lmcole 
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