Ten to Life

9:
I am precautionarily disheartened
by the voluptuous form
that I am genetically likely
to inherit
(though secretly,
I’ve enjoyed the attention)

14:
When boys look at me
I look away
so that they look longer

18:
My body is
a soup kitchen for the lonely;
my heart is a poorly
trained dog that sheds all over strange
blankets and startles the
passersby

23:
Artless ennui for siren song,
I am tastefully barbed
to draw transient samples
of resuscitated avowal from
every set of hands I gnarl

28:
Inhalation in amber;
I convert breathable air
into languid intimation
of the unfulfilled audacity
that my current internment forgives

By Cierra Lowe

Biography:

Cierra Lowe is a poet and half-assed artist living in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Webster University, and is currently pursuing her BSN at University of Missouri – St. Louis. She self-published her first full-length collection—The Horse and the Water—in 2016, and is currently working on her second. When she isn’t trying to poison her husband with undercooked meats, Cierra enjoys compulsively organizing her belongings, changing lanes in intersections, and monitoring planetary motions. She is currently working on a series of letters to female sex symbols who have tragic ends, and well as an uncomfortable collection of interviews. She looks forward to even-numbered years, and her work has previously appeared in Bad Jacket.