Is this Victory?

It feels like whoever lives
here never moved in. Like
a bare bulb switched on in a vacant
back room. Like a portrait of a stranger

hung on an otherwise blank
box of walls.           We all live
some days like a body with no
head and others like a head with

no body. Where do our missing
halves go? Can we text them or
something, send selfies? I hope
mine sends one back, looking

just like an angel, or, I suppose,
looking like what’s left of one.

Author of the article

Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, Quitter, won Diode Editions' Book Prize. She is also the author of The Threatened Everything (Burnside Review Press), Ghost Fargo (selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), Upon Arrival (Black Ocean), and several chapbooks, including the lyric prose Misplaced Sinister. She has been awarded fellowships from the Jerome Foundation, Banfill-Locke Center for the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board. Cisewski lives in Minneapolis, where she teaches both academically and privately.