ZOE KORTE is a queer and mad poet whose work has appeared in Roi Fainéant, Maudlin House, new words {press}, The Quarter(ly), and elsewhere. They have earned degrees in English, Spanish, and Ancient Greek from the University of Missouri. They live with their partner in St. Louis, where they work for Sundress Publications and the Missouri History Museum. You can find them on Instagram @zoekpoetry or Bluesky @mostlymosspoetry.

During the long bucolic summers we would go stay with Big Barb while our parents vacationed at the seminary and she let us take her riding lawnmower out for a drive and we pretended the yawning stretch of yard was the whole purple mountain majesty of the states we'd never seen like Washington was the blueberry bushes up in yonder corner and the three fir trees were the Pacific Northwest and the flat terrain where we flew kites was the Great Plains and the sweet corn patch was Kansas and when we went in for lemonade we became Crayola cartographers who scrambled latitude and longitude and didn't bother with the Mason-Dixon Line because we had a gravel driveway between the zinnias and the Virgin Mary and the mailbox with a rubber snake to scare the birds away

During the long bucolic summers we would go stay with Big Barb while our parents vacationed at the seminary and she let us take her riding lawnmower out for a drive and we pretended the yawning stretch of yard was the whole purple mountain majesty of the states we'd never seen like Washington was the blueberry bushes up in yonder corner and the three fir trees were the Pacific Northwest and the flat terrain where we flew kites was the Great Plains and the sweet corn patch was Kansas and when we went in for lemonade we became Crayola cartographers who scrambled latitude and longitude and didn't bother with the Mason-Dixie Line because we had a gravel driveway between the zinnias and the Virgin Mary and the mailbox with a rubber snake to scare the birds away

During the summers
while our parents pretended
we didn’t bother