This selection, chosen by guest editor Alexis Ivy, is from Certain Shelter by Abbie Kiefer (June Road Press 2024).
On the Wonder Years, Wayne Punches Kevin Again
and calls him a butthead. My mom sighs at the lack
of kindness: brothers angry, father stubbornly
morose. Lonely neighbor Winnie and her war-
dead brother, her parents dividing their grief
in divorce. My mom only wanted
zany family trouble—sulky teen turns sheepdog,
parentless boy befriends chimp.
Though even those old Disney plots could unsettle
my sister. My mom reassured her with statements
of fact: You’ll never be an orphan. We’ll never own a dog.
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.
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