Confession

By Kami Westhoff

I did not want to write this poem. I’m sick of the street 
lined with cotton-candy blossoms, how their scent douses 
my clothes when I pass, their skin-thin petals all fuss and flutter. 

I’m done trying to describe what spring does to the eye—
how it expects the pupil to swallow the tree’s scaffold 
and curve, the slope of muscle from crown to crotch.  

I’m over what it might mean when my daughters find 
a wing-cricked sparrow in my driveway, its pinprick 
wounds nothing like starlight reversed. 

Who cares how quickly the storm stuffed the sky
with its charcoal clouds, pattered my daughters, 
who were worried about the sparrow, with pellets of pearl.

Wait. Let’s be clear. I’m trying to use the right words 
for things—too much pain erupts when we mistake
one thing for another. It was hail, not pearls—
 
just what happens when updrafts whisk water drops 
high enough to freeze, but can’t bear the weight 
of what they’ve become. 

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Kami Westhoff is the author of the story collection, The Criteria, and three poetry chapbooks including Sleepwalker, the winner of the 2016 Dare to Be Contest from Minerva Rising Press. Her work has appeared in such journals as Carve, Meridian, Third Coast, Hippocampus, Booth, Redivider, and West Branch. She teaches creative writing at Western Washington University in Bellingham, WA.

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• We’re proud to introduce our newest Contributing Editor-at-Large, Diamond Forde! Diamond Forde’s debut collection, Mother Body, is the winner of the 2019 Saturnalia Poetry Prize. Forde has received numerous awards and prizes, including a Pink Poetry Prize, a Furious Flower Poetry Prize, and was a finalist for the 2022 Kate Tufts Discovery Award from Claremont Graduate University. A Callaloo, Tin House, and Ruth Lilly Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg fellow, Forde’s work has appeared in POETRY, Obsidian, Massachusetts Review, and more. In her spare time, Forde also serves as the interviews editor of Honey Literary and the fiction editor of Nat. Brut. Please join us in welcoming her!

• 10/4 / Meet the Artist with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 6:00 pm EST / Free

• 10/4 / Poetry Reading with visiting poet-in-residence Raina J. León and local poet Susannah Winters Simpson / The Library at The Betsy-South Beach, Miami Beach, FL / Live and Live-Streamed on Instagram Live/Facebook Live at @swwimmiami / 7:30 pm EST / Free

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