By Danell Jones

Find yourself at crossroads
Stamp your feet
Shake the dust off your metaphor
Give thanks you are not Oedipus
Release your nightmares back to sleep

Embrace the other mind, which is never empty
but plots its way through space as if eternity were
simply a matter of conscientious mapping

This is a crossroads
There is dust
There are tears

This is your story
It takes place at a crossroads
It lives with you
your shadow
your fingerprint

Go forward
Pray the path takes you anywhere but Thebes

Danell Jones was awarded the Jovanovich prize for poetry from the University of Colorado and was a finalist for the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference Poetry Prize, the PEN/Nelson Algren in Fiction, and Finishing Lines Press’s New Women’s Voices Award. She was awarded a Whiting Fellowship in the Humanities and a Bennett Cerf Award. Her work has been published in Denver Quarterly, Beyond Baroque, Gingko Tree Review, Sow’s Ear Poetry Review, and Tonopah Review. She authored The Virginia Woolf Writers’ Workshop (Random House) and Desert Elegy, a chapbook from Finishing Line Press.