BY KATE SCHOLL
When I sit up to get out of bed in the morning,
suddenly my breasts feel the weight of gravity
New soft tissue pulled down towards the center of the earth
Suddenly having to deal with the day
and the responsibility of wakefulness and work
And so for just a moment there is such pain.
And yet the world is saying hey, you have those new things, wake up girl
The earth is reminding me of who I am every day, promptly
My own personal planetary wake up call,
pick me up,
pull me down,
embrace me.

Matthew Zapruder is a poet, a teacher, an editor, a translator, and an accomplished guitar player. He is the co-translator of Romanian poet Eugen Jebeleanu’s last collection, Secret Weapon: Selected Late Poems, and editor-at-large of Wave Books (He edited Tyehimba Jess’s 2017 Pulitzer Prize winner, Olio). Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry—the second of which, The Pajamaist, was selected by Tony Hoagland as the winner of the William Carlos Williams Award—and one book of prose on the art and craft of poetry. He is a professor in the MFA program at St. Mary’s College of California.