Lannie Stabile
I thought Florida was good to you.
You became a tall, bronze man
I could not recognize.
Six months of manual labor mutilated
the hulking body you once carried.
Oh, that whittling southern sun.
But you returned, claiming
our cousin was not good to you.
I assumed he had only cut you down a size.
When, years later, he was arrested
for dismembering and disposing of a man,
you said, See? I told you
he was taking me apart, piece by piece.
Lannie Stabile (she/her), a queer Detroiter, is the winner of OutWrite’s 2020 Chapbook Competition in Poetry; the winning chapbook, “Strange Furniture,” is out with Neon Hemlock Press. She is also a back-to-back finalist for the 2019/2020 and 2020/2021 Glass Chapbook Series and back-to-back semifinalist for the Button Poetry 2018 and 2019 Chapbook Contests. Lannie currently holds the position of Managing Editor at Barren Magazine and is a member of the MMPR Collective. She is a Best of the Net and Pushcart Prize nominee.
Twitter: @LannieStabile
