HONORABLE MENTION
SMALL ORANGE EMERGING WOMAN POET HONOR 2022

AGAINST FEAR

A hand comes out of the dark. The hand holds two orange kittens tight by the scruff. You name the two orange kittens Joanna and Mel. Mel opens her mouth. A ringing sound comes out.

Joanna opens her mouth. There is no sound, only gold coins. You hold the coins inside the trench of your left collarbone.

The sun sets itself down. Pointed slants of light rub themselves like cricket legs. You glance into the slants, find a mirror inside them.

The mirror turns away from you. You turn it back. It turns. You respect the mirror's boundaries. You sigh into your palm.

The sigh is a gray wisp. The gray wisp turns. Not away, but around. The wisp is a tornado. Mel opens her mouth to alert your neighbors. You have no neighbors, only gold coins.

The tornado spins silently, small, inside your palm. You think of closing your fingers over it, but you don't close them. You never do.

Erika Walsh’s work has been featured in Hotel Amerika, Booth, Hobart, Brooklyn Poets, Peach Mag, Juked, and elsewhere. She has been awarded residencies from Sundress Academy of the Arts and Art Farm Nebraska, as well as a fellowship from Brooklyn Poets. Erika is a co-founding editor of A Velvet Giant, a genreless literary journal. She lives in Brooklyn with her pet cat Willa, and will be moving to Alabama in the fall to pursue her MFA in Poetry at the University of Alabama.