Instructions For What Comes Next

By Lori Brack / Issue 5

First, give up everything you thought you knew. Then open your breathless chest and look in. Find the single thing you came here with, attached by only a string. If it is shopworn, treat it tenderly. If it is shiny, put your fingerprints all over it. Call it by its secret name. Give it a drink of water in the night. When the lightning flashes through the window, you will discover its arm outside the covers, cradling you in its grasp.

Lori Brack writes and teaches in Missouri. Her poems are forthcoming in Another Chicago Magazine, Weave and in the anthology Begin Again from Woodley Press. Other publications include Packingtown Review, Rosebud, North American Review and her 2010 chapbook, A Fine Place to See the Sky, published by The Field School, New York.