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Author Bio

 Jane Huffman is a poet from Michigan. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Denver. Jane was a 2019 recipient of the Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is founder and editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal.

 Judge Bio

Dana Levin’s newest book of poetry is Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press 2022), named a “Best of 2022 Book” by NPR. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting.”

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Public Abstract

I swept

and am

sweeping, have

slept

and am sleeping.

I heaved the head

of the mop

to the hod

and I’m heaving.

I’m

sweating,

I’m wetting

the corn

of my broom.

I’m

washing

the floor

in the room

where I

waited for

reason.

I reasoned,

I teased

at the

edges of

reason.

Spirometry

I am under-interpreting my symptoms, the doctor says.

I have grown accustomed to them, and so I no longer interpret

them as abnormal. My account can no longer be trusted.

I watch his screens from inside the glass box. On one monitor,

green lines tick against a dark backdrop. On another, a cursor

draws absentmindedly, making the shape of a bread roll.

Now do it, the doctor says, as if you’re breathing against a

brick wall. On a third monitor, a dark circle expands and

contracts like a pulsing eyespot. Air buckles in the back of

my mouth.

So it says here you teach writing, the doctor says, here

at the University. His intonation makes it a question,

although it is not. The machine beeps, and I exhale fast and

hard

until my lungs are bottomed out. I’m so in love with interpretation

that I’m blue in the face from kissing it.