This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Inside Out Egg by Robin LaMer Rahija (Variant Lit 2024).
I Can Never Put a Bird in a Poem because my Name is Robin and that is NOT Fair
(excerpt)
V.
My first blood orange was a surprise.
I thought What creature is in here
all curled up and pierced.
It was just my own thumbs
sloughing the rind.
I could be happy in a cave.
We put a box in the abysmal ocean.
We crawl inside the box.
We put a fish in a fishbowl in the box.
You can tell a human being
by their eyes.
They are always beautiful.
If they are not beautiful
one of you is not human.
Robin LaMer Rahija is originally from Kansas City, MO but has lived in Kentucky for over a decade. She received her MFA from the University of Kentucky, where she is currently the Department Manager Associate in the Department of English. In 2010, she co-founded and edited Rabbit Catastrophe Press, a handbound, feminist, book arts micropress, which closed in 2020. In 2015, she co-founded Workhorse Writers Collective, a publishing and education platform for poets outside of academia. Her chapbook, Breaking News, was published by dancing girl press in 2023. Her poems have appeared in Puerto Del Sol, FENCE, Guernica, and elsewhere. Inside Out Egg is her first full-length book, published by Variant Lit in 2024.
Livia Meneghin (she/her) is the author of the chapbook Honey in My Hair and is the Sundress Publications Reads Editor. She has earned a Writers’ Room of Boston Poetry Fellowship, Breakwater Review’s 2022 Peseroff Prize, an Academy of American Poets 2020 University Prize, and most recently Second Place in The Room Magazine’s 2023 Poetry Contest. After earning her MFA, she now teaches writing and literature at the collegiate level. She is a cancer survivor.
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