Juliana Gray’s second collection, Roleplay, won the 2010 Orphic Prize and was recently published by Dream Horse Press. A chapbook, Anne Boleyn’s Sleeve, won the 2013 Winged City Chapbook Press poetry chapbook contest was published this year. Recent poems have appeared in or are forthcoming from PMS: poemmemoirstory, Measure, 32 Poems, River Styx and elsewhere. An Alabama native, she lives in western New York and is an associate professor of English at Alfred University.
Alien parents tuck their dearest pearl / into a pod, a rocket, a crystal crèche / and launch it into hopeful space. The girl / or boy or multi-gendered child inside / dies in hypersleep; the fuel depletes...