This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Inside Out Egg by Robin LaMer Rahija (Variant Lit 2024).
Quail Eggs at the Farmer’s Market
I passed them and had to go back
a slow full body double take as
my brain caught up to my eyes.
They were glowing
like Sassoferrato’s Madonnas.
A small basket of the smallest eggs
all a soul shade of taupe
with the dark blotches of heartache.
My whole raw body ached for them
to do what I don’t know.
Not to cook them and eat them.
Nothing this holy should be consumed.
I suppose just hold them and stare
forever at them to protect them
or start a whole social media account
for them like a pet or a house plant
or wait until I was alone and hold them
in the nest of my bare belly and pretend
I could create anything beautiful enough to be loved.
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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