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Exit Plans
My ex-mother-in-law hates my guts.
I still have the cooking pot she gave us
as a wedding gift. It has lasted longer
than both of my marriages, & this fact
is definitely not lost on me. I use it
now to make hard-boiled eggs,
until my kitchen smells like death.
I bury grudges in cookie jars
& beneath floorboards the way
my grandmother stashed cash
from her husband, the way some men
stow side chicks. The only thing more
human than wanting to believe in love,
is having a secret exit plan.
At some point, don’t all of us hope
for a way out of whatever we’ve chosen?
Near the end of my first marriage,
I caught my husband in a lie so elaborate,
so astonishing, that my shock gave way
to reverence. It’s impossible to know
how far we can go until we arrive.
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Joan Kwon Glass is a diasporic Korean poet, author of Daughter of Three Gone Kingdoms, winner of the 2024 Perugia Press Poetry Prize, and Night Swim, winner of the 2021 Diode Book Prize. Her poems have been featured in Poetry, The Slowdown, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Terrain, Poetry Northwest, Tahoma Literary Review, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. Joan has been a finalist for the Tupelo Press Helena Whitehill Book Award, the Poetry Northwest Possession Sound Series, and the University of Akron Poetry Prize. She is a 2025 Writer in Residence for SWWIM, a visiting writer at Amherst College, Smith College, and Wesleyan University, and serves as a teacher for several writing centers throughout the country.
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Casey Niccoli, Last Exit to the Strawberry Stars, mixed media collage, ca. 2024