so I’m obliged to spend
the day cleaning up.
Existence feels urgent,
on my knees, folding
blouses. This rut is less
a rut and more an oceanic
trench I swim in, rudderless,
admiring the vastness.
Sometimes I do arm exercises
involving miniscule muscle
movements, wear 1-pound
wrist weights and perform up
and down cactus to sculpt
my shoulders all sleek
and mechanical. Other times
I get high and understand
the fourth dimension not
kidding, then research how to
monetize my enlightenment
as snow flurries land in uniform
clumps on the fire escape.
Mostly I feel like a sexy half-
sleeping beauty, slinking around
on Lorazepam, touching myself
at 3PM and watching TV
from what feels like a very long
distance away. My calm is muscular,
my third eye open. In group therapy
someone is like That’s what the pills
are for: extracting you from ugly
proximity. Recently I left the house
and stood in a good luck spot
someone chalked on the sidewalk.
I thought of all the good luck,
airborne, quivering as it flew
axeheaded, toward me.

Christine Marella is from Northern California. She holds a BS from Northwestern University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Poetry at NYU, where she is a Jan Gabriel Fellow.

Best known for her visceral gouache paintings of ephemeral landscapes, Maysey Craddock examines the dualities and mysteries of nature and those relationships to space and time. Through saturated earth tones and translucent elemental layers, she depicts the spaces in between and what happens beyond the grasp of human control. Based on her own photographs of wetlands and other fragile wild spaces, her process layers intricate drawings and painting onto sewn together paper bags - a conceptual regeneration which mirrors the geological processes she depicts and references the way we seek to both shape and preserve what we see in nature. Maysey Craddock currently lives and works in Memphis. She received an MFA from Maine College of Art, Portland, ME and a BA from Tulane University in New Orleans. She has participated in numerous solo exhibitions across the United States and Germany and has received awards, grants and residencies, including the Tennessee Artist Fellowship; an Individual Artist Fellowship Award from the Tennessee Arts Commission; Artist in Residence at Oberpfälzer Künstlerhaus, Schwandorf, Germany; Artist in Residence at Maine College of Art; and sculpture and painting residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and the Virginia Center for Creative Arts. She is represented by Sears Peyton Gallery (New York and L.A.), David Lusk Gallery (Memphis and Nashville) and Cris Worley Fine Arts (Dallas).