Sophie Allen
this discontent registers on the richter scale.
books aren’t falling off the shelves, hitting the floor
with dusty paperback thumps & there isn’t any warning
on the news but bile ascends in waves, stinks like low tide. the force
of this discontent hits at different times from coast to coast
& it rises & it falls & everyone feels it
in different ways— little spikes of fever-pitch rage emerge
from the quaking of discontent at each corner, each spike
driven into the soil. the building stays up.
Sophie Allen is a rising freshman at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is not sure how often she should be watering her cactus.
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