Alice Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee. Her first full-length collection, The Time of Hunger | O Tempo de Chuva, is available now from Salmon Poetry. A second book, Moth, is forthcoming in 2019. Currently, she lives and writes in Shanghai.

 

Morning

 

The teat in my fist

squirts, misses steel,

hits straw. I am as thirsty

for lost milk as the calf

mewling in its stall.

 

~

Insomnia*

 

 

 * The first section of this poem first appeared as an individual piece in The Bitter Oleander