she tells me the story of giving herself
a Brazilian when she was nine months pregnant.
"Girl, you should be the fuckin’ President,"
I want to say, but instead I stick with
"No, you didn’t!"
"I did! It went on forever! I was like..."
—she mimes tunneling up—
"where's the top of this thing?!"
Jennifer L. Knox is the author of four books of poems. Her work has appeared four times in The Best American Poetry series as well as in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and American Poetry Review. The Los Angeles Book Review said of her most recent book, Days of Shame & Failure, "This panopoly of twenty first century American human experience leaves the reader a different person." She teaches in the Creative Writing program at Iowa State University and is currently at work on a culinary memoir.
