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Illustration by Zihao Lin

Order

 It was snowing when I dialed, raining 
when I hung up, chaos even for me 
who mixes the chaff back into the wheat 
and salts the on-ramps and rakes up needles 
only to scatter them on the ground and 
walk through as if to cut a covenant, 
or sew one together. At dawn, with all 
the inertia of imagination, 
I laced my boots and cradled the laundry. 
Is it even worth it to clean these clothes? 
No matter. When the washer door clicked shut 
I knew that ours is not the slipped disk in 
the spine of a novel, it’s just the end 
and so we wring it out, make it lie flat. 

— Lauren Dominguez Chan is a junior in Grace Hopper College.

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