Christine Hamm
R IS FOR RESTLESS

Palm Beach, a fake emerald bracelet scratching your wrist.

You crawl to the bed, the industrial carpet rubbing its cigarette stink all over you. You remember the man’s hands, the scars and words scrawled across them.

A wilted yellow carnation on the nightstand. Your ruffled dress with pink and black diamonds sprawled across a chair. A ceiling full of tiny stabbed-in holes.

The damp circle your body makes on the sheets dissipates. Eventually, you stop shivering.

Christine Hamm has a PhD  in American Poetics and is a former poetry editor for Ping*Pong. She won the MiPoesias First Annual Chapbook Competition with her manuscript Children Having Trouble with Meat. Her poetry has been published in Orbis, Pebble Lake Review, Lodestar Quarterly, Poetry Midwest, Rattle, Dark Sky, and many others. She has been nominated four times for a Pushcart Prize, and she teaches English at CUNY. Echo Park, her third book of poems, came out from Blazevox in the fall of 2011. Christine was a runner-up to the Poet Laureate of Queens.