Anna Strong: DEAR COUCH • Cleaver Magazine

Anna Strong
DEAR COUCH

Dear Couch,

I want to zip myself in a pocket and watch baseball. You say sit down and stop moving the furniture around. A square of light hits my palm from the gap in the curtain teeth and I want it to fill my creases with more than skin. Despite spiders, my name is safe in your mouth. Grain by grain you’re putting salt on your tongue. The game ends, there are questions, outside it’s all purple and traffic. When you’re asleep on my knees and it’s just me and the crushed end of chips and the street below wide awake, I remember my first god was my mother, my second, the light switch.

Anna Strong is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania originally from Haverford, PA. Her work has previously appeared in the Penn Review, the Pennsylvania Gazette, and is forthcoming in Peregrine. Currently she is working on her senior honors thesis, a collection of prose poems tentatively titled Apostrophes. Anna also helps teach Penn’s Modern and Contemporary American Poetry course through Coursera.