HONORABLE MENTION
SMALL ORANGE EMERGING WOMAN POET HONOR 2022

Her Name Before Scheherazade

A gallery:        lines of heads turning toward

the sound of her

name in each other’s mouth.               Wind through

broken pipes, leaking syllables:

her and her and her and her / end her end her end her end her      and

                        her end            is harder to write because it requires

a beginning.

                        Once, there was a girl who turned into a woman.

                        Once, there was a woman who turned into a memory.

                        Once there was a memory of a girl, it kept repeating.

A name becomes the sound of a sentence,

            the execution of its subject.

She walks the rows, their eyes ellipses.

She tells the story of a woman           

and she                        lived/ lives/ will live

and she                        anticipates the verb coming after

Shannon Austin (she/her) is a writer from Baltimore, MD, with an MFA in poetry from the University of Nevada-Las Vegas. Her work has appeared in Drunk Monkeys, Rust + Moth, Nimrod Journal, Okay Donkey, and elsewhere. She can be found online at shannonaustin.net and on Twitter @gogopoetranger.