By Thea Swanson
You should get paid
more the college student said privy
to my sham
on display the adjunct
dilemma mastery for pennies the odor
of home disrepair clinging
to my syllabus
At the pricey private school
the sixth-grader interrupted
my grammar lesson: Is that a cowgirl shirt
you’re wearing, Mrs. Swanson? the snake
of humiliation trails
my path its bite perennial inducing
no immunity
Please take this
middle ground this charade let me serve
you bread let me scrub
your tiles ambiguity
be gone
Once
in English 100
i preached
the evils of meth a man
in the back
called out I KNOW
WHERE YOU LIVE
Thea Swanson is a feminist atheist who holds an MFA in Writing from Pacific University in Oregon. She is the Founding Editor of Club Plum Literary Journal, and her flash-fiction collection, Mars, was published by Ravenna Press in 2017. Her hybrid essay and poem collection, How To Be a Woman, was longlisted for the 2021 Dzanc Nonfiction Prize. Her flash-fiction collection, There and Here, was longlisted in the Tarpaulin Sky Press 2020 Book Awards. She is a fiction finalist in the 2020 Best of the Net Anthology, and her poetry, fiction and essays are published in places such as Mid-American Review, Spillway, Crab Creek Review, World Literature Review and Northwest Review. For more of her work, visit theaswanson.com.
