Help for the Reality Challenged
Laura McCullough
Excerpted from Lux & Cyborg, Anomalous Press Chapbook Contest Notable
click here to read about the full project
Overhead the ticker, DOW across the clouds,
silver alert on the Garden State Parkway,
black boy—hoodie, ear buds—Florida going
down anyway, the coast in danger, surging
seas just a click away, the map will show your
danger status. The clouds, see the reflection
up there, pollution keeping the moisture screen
alive. Don’t be willful. The image is you.
Don’t have anything to apologize for.
Apologize for everything. It’s
all you have to give. Pardon our appearance
while we reconstruct this mess, ourselves at best.
Laura McCullough's books of poetry include Rigger Death & Hoist Another (Black Lawrence Press), Panic (winner of a 2009 Kinereth Gensler Award, Alice James Books), Speech Acts, and What Men Want. She is the editor of two anthologies, An Integrity of Aloneness: Essays on the Poetry of Stephen Dunn, forthcoming from Syracuse University Press, and Essays on Poetry and Race: the Task of Un/Masking, forthcoming from University of Georgia Press. She is the editor of Mead: the Magazine of Literature and Libations and an editor at large for TranStudies Magazine. She holds an MFA in fiction from Goddard College, and her essays, criticism, poems, creative non-fiction, and short fiction have appeared in or are forthcoming in The Georgia Review, The Birmingham Review, The Florida Review, New South, Guernica, The American Poetry Review, Green Mountains Review, Pank, The Writer's Chronicle, Gulf Coast, Pedestal, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others.
