This selection, chosen by guest editor Sarah Clark, is from The Company Misery Loves by Kate Fox (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions 2024).
The Illusion of Choice
What what would you like to be when you grow up?
Elsewhere.
Say you could have been raised
by wolves—mange-festered, feral,
starving for the last thrash of a rabbit,
the more calculated ambush of a deer.
Or say the opera had adopted you
at birth, the final aria of a dwindling
company gone bankrupt with passion,
your sable coat the only remnant
of their worth. But no, you chose
to be born here, among towns
like Flagler, Bovina, Seibert, Bethune,
places you pass through on your way
to somewhere else, unless you
live here—then you stay,
thinking the name on the water tower
means you, or that oil mixed with rain
in a hubcap is beautiful, which it is
because you own it, or think you do,
in your hand-me-down jacket
and the galoshes you wear
for cowboy boots, galloping along
past Hedgecoke’s Grocery, Eunice’s Cafe,
on your way to face some stranger.
Kate Fox is the author of The Company Misery Loves (Sheila-Na-Gig Editions), a collection of poems published in July 2024, and two poetry chapbooks: The Lazarus Method, winner of the Wick Poetry Chapbook Competition (Kent State University Press) and Walking Off the Map (Seven Kitchens Press). Her work has appeared in Great River Review, Kenyon Review, New Ohio Review, Valparaiso Review, and Pleiades. Her poem “The Heaven of Lost Limbs” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her poem, “No Word for Those Who Lose a Child,” was a finalist in Cutthroat Literary Magazine’s Joy Harjo Poetry Competition. She lives in Athens OH with her partner, writer and Steinbeck scholar Robert DeMott, and their two English setters, Katie and Patch.
Sarah Clark is a mad crip genderfuck two-spirit enrolled Nanticoke editor, writer, and cultural consultant. They are Editor-in-Chief and Poetry Editor at ANMLY, Editor-in-Chief at ALOCASIA: a journal of queer plant-based writing, and Editor-in-Chief at beestung. They are an editor on the Bettering American Poetry series, and a current Board member and Assistant Editor at Sundress Publications. They have edited folios for publications including the GLITTERBRAIN folio and a folio on Indigenous & Decolonial Futures & Futurisms at ANMLY. Sarah freelances, and has worked with a number of literary and arts publications and organizations, including the Best of the Net anthology, contemptorary, Curious Specimens, #PoetsResist at Glass Poetry, Apogee Journal, Blackbird, the Paris Review, and elsewhere.
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