This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Inside Out Egg by Robin LaMer Rahija (Variant Lit 2024).
The Habit of Maintenance Is Its Own Purpose
(excerpt)
IV.
Three people said I love you
this year and none were you
and none stuck around
very long and none wondered
what I was thinking about anything.
I had felt the animal rising in me.
Then one refused a blackberry
off the vine.
Then one shrank and shrank
in soul and vocabulary.
Then one was just plain boring
and I recoiled.
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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