Emma DePanise

IDEAS FOR FUTURE INSTRUCTION MANUALS

How to hold another’s eyes

              open. How to smooth the cold-

 

                          cracked lines in your hands. How not

              to be cold. How to shiver. How to see more

 

in your peripheral vision. How to sip a lime

              whole. How to soften

 

                          your sheets. How to coax the pen

              back to ink. How to lie

 

on your back when all your life

              you’ve slept on your stomach.

 

Emma DePanise’s poems are forthcoming or have appeared recently in journals such as River Styx, The Minnesota Review, Reed Magazine, The National Poetry Review, Passages North and elsewhere. She is the 2020 winner of the Blue Earth Review Summer Contest in Poetry, a 2019 winner of an AWP Intro Journals Award and the 2018 winner of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. She is an MFA candidate in poetry and teaching assistant at Purdue University, a poetry editor for Sycamore Review and a co-editor of The Shore Poetry.

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