This selection, chosen by guest editor Livia Meneghin, is from Inside Out Egg by Robin LaMer Rahija (Variant Lit 2024).
So Many
beautiful things lived here.
That small boned bird that glowed in the understory.
That big wide mushroom that was underneath us that whole time.
That elm the autumn of the drought when the leaves fell before they
changed.
I stood under a field of green on a field of green on a field of green.
I understood then. There is no need to hurry death forward.
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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