four poems from SITUATION DEPARTMENT

The bright copper narrative beneath me,
or maybe it’s a swivel chair.
Wearing such a color blue. It hangs
on my shoulders. It gets in my hair.
I wait at the edge of the turnstile
for something to happen. I wait until
waiting makes me vanish. Then rematerialize
in a subway station. Underneath the curse
of the street. Unencumbered. But completely alone.
A copper train rushes towards me. Shining
as brightly as a computer. But it had not occurred
to me, as the train rematerialized on the platform
of my screen, what it would take













A computer is a website none can drink from.
A website like myself.
Sorry, but I don’t have time to wait.
Like a betta fish in a Tupperware, I am narrow.

Most sounds have been combined.
A building retains water like an excel spreadsheet.
It’s a great day for tulips, but I’m not a tulip.
It’s a bad day to be a material, but I’m not anything
else. I seek no steeple. Can be kept on no shelf.













There’s no way into my hurricane.
That it should stumble. That it should digress.
That it should have been more average, better-tilted,
hovered from thin air into dignified newness
without the hint of a washboard in its wake.
In the window, every pod is the same, and every
vehicle spells the word “pod” out,
and I am not spelled like anything, my name is
written in the mud for all to see
with all its letters taken out.
Now that I have your attention
it is time to do a spell.













I didn’t buy the situation
but I bought the department.
“IT WASN’T WHAT IT WAS,”
the bureaucrat had made me
transcribe verbatim in sharpie.
Where will I end up when I refuse
to suffer even surfaces that are near me?
Will I walk with purpose?
Shrink down like a newspaper, tiny?
The truth, rectangular,
perfect, right beside me?

Biographical Statement

Nora Claire Miller is the author of Groceries (2025), which was selected by Srikanth Reddy as the winner of the Fonograf Editions Open Genre Contest. They live in Western Massachusetts where they’re the editor-in-chief of Ghost Proposal and the founder and director of Somehow School, a creative writing school for kids.