Long E

The podcast guest pronounced it queerulous
and that long e turned my mind to mischief,
or mischievious, a misspelling born in the mouths
of 16th century English, kissing its way to my own.
But I’ll text it properly: Look how mischievous I am.
Squirming in my chair, primed for teeny harms
and discomforts. Later she sends me
a screenshot of my name in her phone, spelled so
that the long e is clear, a sound that doesn’t
correspond to its phonetics but to Midwestern ears—
The way I say pink sometimes and it feels
better, pinker. Meanwhile, I’m sinking into
the torturing hour between texts and dates, one week
of NRE’s strange fire stoked and spent on phone banks.
Hang up on me. Hang upon me. Here and here.

Krysia Wazny McClain is a poet, writer, and editor from Somerville, Massachusetts. She is a graduate of the Bennington Writing Seminars, and her poetry and criticism have appeared in Porridge Magazine, the Massachusetts Poetry Festival’s Ekphrastic Gallery, and the Colorado Review. She is also an abolitionist community organizer and performs as the sapphic pigeon poet Livia Dove with the Boston Poetry Brothel.