Emily Pittinos

        LIGHTS UP on LOST DAUGHTER in a thorny berry patch. 

        Young bucks lock horns before her quiver of poison kisses. 

        At the pick-your-own, she plops berries into a jar meant for marbles.

       She plucks a loathsome prickle from her panties, overhears lovers
         recounting how fiercely they care.






Orange flowers. Orange wind.
                                                        The rain falls as I expect.

Autumn surprises with a blustery story about loving—bright yellow
accents, the blue blur of wanting. Still,
                                                                      the familiar hole smashes through the dawn.

Bright shame in the face. So many wordless ways to say “no, not you.”
Old loss made new.






        She wields her yellow umbrella, a blotch on chapel glass.
        She rests her feet on a trove of roadside piñatas.

        Mist holds the shape of a tent in the empty field.

        LIGHTS UP on yet another waking YOU: the bright-bright of the broken day
        shocking with its tint of “but what then?”
                                                                                Before YOU woke, a guinea hen

        roosted in the meadow brush of the mind, and beside the meadow brush, LOST 
        DAUGHTER was the hounded vole and the digging, her hours coated in a 
        crumble of chase, chase, chase.


        Beyond this scene: the switchgrass winter-blonde in the gulch, and the fog
        cut through into portions and parted.
                                                                        Razor light. The feast of air-taking.


        In the meadow brush, her parts dissolved into the winter-summoned stream,
        winter summoning steam from her warmest parts, and her resolve.




Who do I become once torn into morning, suddenly,

or at least it seems,
                                    so known and bound?



In the meadow brush, LOST DAUGHTER carved a figurine of herself

and became it.




This next dawn: a becoming so common that I can’t, or won’t, step through.

Emily Pittinos is a Great Lakes poet and essayist currently teaching in Providence, RI. Pittinos has received a 2022 Literature Fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, as well as support from Vermont Studio Center, the Alexa Rose Foundation, and Washington University in St. Louis, where she served as the Senior Fellow in Poetry. Her recent work appears, or will soon appear, in Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day, The Adroit Journal, Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Mississippi Review, New England Review, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is the author of Animal, Roadkill, Ashes, Gone (essays), (Bull City Press, 2022), as well as the debut poetry collection, The Last Unkillable Thing (University of Iowa Press, Spring 2021), which was a winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize and a finalist for a 2022 Midwest Book Award.