Jenny M. Xie, who won First Place in Narrative’s Fourth Annual Poetry Contest, is the author of the chapbook Nowhere to Arrive and the poetry collections The Rupture Tense and Eye Level, which won the Academy of American Poets Walt Whitman Award and the Holmes National Poetry Prize. She received her MFA from New York University, where she teaches, and lives in Brooklyn.

Two Poems

by Jenny M. Xie

Prisoners

By then, we had developed a taste for the clean face of sleep. How could we have tired ourselves so? We accomplished very little. With not enough gunnysacks to go around, some of us covered our bodies with lottery tickets. We said untrue things to make the time go faster. Our teeth bright with holes. Nights, sentences clattered in us until they didn’t. I’d forgotten all about humiliation. It wasn’t clear if there was an outside world to our outside world. Every few weeks, voices leaked in from the windows. Other times, kernels of rainwater and ice.

People on couch
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