Palinody by Caroline Crew

Modesty not when the mood strikes,
………………………………………….when the mood is struck.
I change on a cellular basis in ignorant repetition—the infinite

scroll of a body switched on— ignorant dysregulation.
The past can be undone.

Sometimes I walk into the room in which I write and beg
begin to all the absences listening.
………………………………………….Sometimes I am the absence

in the room in which my body is being written.

Caroline Crew is the author of the essay collection Other Girls to Burn (forthcoming, University of Georgia Press), winner of the AWP Prize for Nonfiction, as well as the poetry collection PINK MUSEUM (Big Lucks). Currently, she is pursuing a PhD at Georgia State University, after earning an MSt at the University of Oxford and an MFA at UMass-Amherst. She’s online here: caroline-crew.com.