This selection, chosen by guest editor john compton, is from Nighttime by Marina Hope Wilson (Cooper Dillon Books 2024).
Language of Dominion
Perhaps those maps are beautiful, too.
Vibrant cities growing inside you.
What do we dare call
progress? This advancement.
My brother drew boats and planes and
faces with deep set eyes on the old blueprints.
Foundations, property lines, numbers
landing under his sketches,
in the language of dominion.
The only imperative is to build.
Push and work and repeat.
Eat when you’re hungry.
And drink. Just don’t shrink.
There’s no time to be still.
Expand into what little space you have.
Marina Hope Wilson is the author of the chapbook, Nighttime (Cooper Dillon Books, 2024). Her poems have appeared in journals such as The Massachusetts Review, $, trampset, Stirring, Bicoastal Review, and SWWIM Every Day. Marina is a 2024-25 Friends of the San Francisco Public Library Brown-Handler Artist-in-Residence. She lives in San Francisco with her husband, stepdaughter, and two cats, and she makes her living as a speech-language therapist. 
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