Love is not a lie
because it ends. All night
the earth releases its sweetness.

The golden grass cools
to the crickets’ ticking. I was
alive and then I woke

from a dream. I looked
out the window at the empty
stars. Hours until morning.

Jory Mickelson (they/he) is a queer writer whose first book, WILDERNESS//KINGDOM, is the inaugural winner of the Evergreen Award Tour from Floating Bridge Press and winner of the 2020 High Plains Book Award in Poetry. Their publications include Court Green, Painted Bride Quarterly, Jubilat, Sixth Finch, Diode, and The Rumpus. They are the recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize and were awarded fellowships from the Lambda Literary Foundation, Winter Tangerine, and the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation of New Mexico. They are a 2022 Jack Straw Writer in Seattle, Washington where they are writing about queerness, visual art, and erasure.