This selection, chosen by managing editor Krista Cox, is from The Familiar by Sarah Kain Gutowski (Texas A&M University Press 2024).
A Little Push
My extraordinary self turned out to be less extraordinary
than we’d anticipated. She wasn’t even good at packing up
her things: she kept removing, then replacing, her tap shoes
and favorite sequined gowns—glitter escaping cellophane
to coat her fingers, the bedspread, all surfaces inside
and beyond her suitcase. Now we find reminders of her
everywhere. My ordinary self lifts the shades in the morning
and frowns—sunlight refracts off tiny squares adhered
to the nightstand, the hamper’s wicker rings. This will take
hours and days to remove. Her personal items sit tossed
in a corner, what we found after she’d left: wads of foreign
paper currency; a camera leaking acrid batteries;
the loose ephemera of a brief photography career.
She left not in a rush but in a cloud of disarray and tears,
the melodrama that marked her too overwrought
for the stage. She didn’t want to stay but didn’t want
to go, didn’t want to make the decision to separate.
My ordinary self gave her a little push: nothing too
vicious, just pressure along the shoulders that said: This
is your direction. It was the tree leaves grinding like teeth
that whispered: It won’t do any good to look back.
Sarah Kain Gutowski (she/her) is the author of two books, The Familiar, an Eric Hoffer Book Award finalist, and Fabulous Beast, runner-up for the 2018 X.J. Kennedy Prize, a 2019 Foreword INDIES Finalist, and winner of the 14th annual National Indies Excellence Award for Poetry. With interdisciplinary artist Meredith Starr, she is co-creator of Every Second Feels Like Theft, a conversation in cyanotypes and poetry, and It’s All Too Much, a limited edition audio project. Her poems have appeared in The Threepenny Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, and The Southern Review, and her essays in Write or Die magazine and The Revisionist. A member of the National Book Critics Circle, her criticism has been published by Colorado Review and Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women. 
Krista Cox is the Managing Editor of Sundress Publications, The Wardrobe, and Doubleback Review. She’s a poet and editor and currently pursuing her master’s in clinical mental health counseling. Mostly, like everyone, she’s just trying to stay hydrated while she fights the system.
