“Raking Over Our Souls” by Peter Groesbeck

Bumped up tracks
redder than the rest of you.
Rivers of corduroy worn like scarves.
Your little hurts.

Inside: sleek, unblemished.
Inside: the same you God stitched
together—hastily, in Heaven,
then threw down like a stone.

Anne Dyer Stuart holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the Center for Writers at the University of Southern Mississippi. Her lyric nonfiction won New South journal’s 2012 prose prize, and her fiction received the Henfield/Transatlantic Prize from the Joseph F. McCrindle Foundation. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Pembroke Magazine, Sakura Review, The Midwest Quarterly, Poet Lore, The Louisville Review, Third Coast, Midway Journal, Best of the Web, storySouth and elsewhere. She teaches at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania.

Anne is featured here.