Maria S. Picone/수영
Summer 2025 | Poetry
At the Tatte in Back Bay
not Emerson a few blocks over,
we stalk out the real estate.
I hold my backpack next to my shin,
let its weight incline me like metaphor.
A rare hour when I can be myself in public.
I don’t feel like anyone’s bright light
being snuffed out but I have given
my all, as Jillian Michaels demands.
Later, in the hotel gym, I sustain 180+ bpm
instead of breaking down. I’m tired
of not being myself. Heart exhausts
heart. I want to live here, near
the sauna with its cold immersion
the Atlantic on a good beach day.
I wipe down the handles for the next
run; no sprint is going to bring me home.
Maria S. Picone/수영 (mariaspicone.com; @mspicone) is a queer Korean American adoptee who has three chapbooks: Anti Asian Bias, Adoptee Song (forthcoming Game Over Books), This Tenuous Atmosphere (Conium). She has been published in Tahoma Literary Review, Reckoning, and others including Best Small Fictions 2021. She won Salamander’s Louisa Solano Memorial Emerging Poet Prize, Cream City Review’s 2020 Poetry Prize, and support from Kenyon Review, Juniper, Tin House, Hambidge, The Watering Hole, South Carolina Arts Commission, South Arts, and elsewhere. She edits at Chestnut Review, Five Minutes, and Foglifter.