about the author
Annie Virginia is a high school English teacher with a degree in poetry and street vigilantism from Sarah Lawrence College. She thinks the education system is broken and would rather read and write poems with kids or anyone all day every day. You can find her work in the anthologies A Shadow Map from Civil Coping Mechanisms and The Queer South from Sibling Rivalry Press as well as in The Legendary, Lobster Arsenic, and elsewhere. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee for her work in Broad! magazine.
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One Poem
Annie Virginia
the barefoot
the cellist draws bow
over string as ready as throat
and so willing to pour
light bones under some heaviest commandment
a mother drawing the knife
across the neck of her firstborn
that kind of love
with beaded friction
and a rich ocean to spring forth
her hands a fox so fast you dream
of catching it in a snare of lightning
so you can eat it without fire
hands as fast as time and you
slaver to taste what makes
the fox legs twitch in fresh death
and you wonder if you would fall
inside her if she’d play you
anything like that