This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer (June Road Press 2024).
Resolutions
I’ve been thinking I should lighten up
a little. Let our boys go barefoot
in the soupy pool shower room.
At three in the morning, resist
waking them to search
their armpits for ticks. Watch them leap
from the top of the tire swing and not wince
or warn. Forget my childhood home,
its tidy basement bleeding radon,
my mom’s lungs turned wet
and treacherous. Forget those lungs
and your lungs. All the cigarettes
you smoked in college.
Ignore the narrowness
of your bike lane, the greedy bite
of your chainsaw, the small and shrinking
difference between your age now
and the age of your dad when he died.
Stop calculating: If I were the one to die,
could you afford a good sitter? Someone
who would find adventures—
streams and boulders, trees for climbing.
Who would urge our boys with all the ease
I lacked: Go. Yes, go. What’s the worst
that can happen?
Abbie Kiefer is the author of Certain Shelter (June Road Press, 2024), named a 2025 Julia Ward Howe Award Notable Book, and the chapbook Brief Histories (Whittle Micro-Press, 2024). Her work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Atlantic, Copper Nickel, Gulf Coast, Image, The Missouri Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, Prairie Schooner, The Southern Review, and other places. She is a poetry editor for The Adroit Journal and lives in New Hampshire.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry. She is the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. She is co-editor of Essential Voices: A COVID-19 Anthology (West Virginia University Press, 2023). A recent resident of the Sundress Academy for the Arts, she lives in her hometown Boston, working as an advocate for the homeless, and teaching in the PoemWorks community.
