Chelsea Fanning
By the new moon you’ll be packing boxes, stuffing
garbage bags with sweaters and heavy-winter socks.
You’ll preach new beginnings as you draw a line
from Maine to North Dakota, molting miles
and self-disgust like feathers.
You’ll mark your passage on faded billboard signs –
keep the receipts from hotel diner dives.
You’ll photograph roadside attractions, crowd
a cigar box with polaroids of still-stranger faces.
You’ll think you’re chiseling out a piece of America,
stowing it away for future generations, but really
you’re trying to locate yourself on highways
that crisscross and confuse like these lines
on the palm of your hand.
***
Chelsea Fanning is a writer, poet, editor, feminist, witch from New Jersey. She has an MFA from Drew University and is the poetry editor at Fatal Flaw Magazine. Previous work has appeared or is forthcoming in From Whispers to Roars, OyeDrum, Mom Egg Review, Rogue Agent, Phantom Drift Limited, Ethel Zine, Big City Lit, Synkroniciti, They Call Us, Flora Fiction, Literary North, and Cauldron Anthology. Her poetry delves into themes of redefinition, reclamation, wholeness, muchness, womanhood, religion, identity, gender, rebirth, and regeneration.