~
Catch
Today your assignment is to steal
everything you can get your hands on:
the salt and pepper shaker from the coffee shop,
the hammer from the hardware store,
a shirt, a newspaper,
your neighbor’s dog.
Tomorrow you are to return them all
subtly, neatly.
We’ll see
which you most regret.
Which gets you caught.
Next week, we’ll work on insults and apologies.
The week after, solitude,
which is what someone like you
who would contemplate such exercises
deserves.
~
Co-winner of Reed Magazine‘s Edwin Markham Prize (2019), Jeanne Julian is the author of Like the O in Hope and two chapbooks. Her poems appear in Poetry Quarterly, Lascaux Prize 2016 Anthology, Minerva Rising and other journals and have won awards from The Comstock Review, Naugatuck River Review, and the North Carolina Poetry Society. www.jeannejulian.com