Debra Marquart is the author of three poetry collections, including Small Buried Things, as well as a short story collection, The Hunger Bone: Rock & Roll Stories. Her memoir, The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere, was awarded the 2007 PEN USA Creative Nonfiction Award. A finalist in Narrative’s Fourth Annual Poetry Contest and in the 2017 Winter Story Contest, she serves as professor of English and director of the MFA program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University and teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of Southern Maine.

Couples Traveling

by Debra Marquart

Worse than traveling alone is to be stranded in security
behind couples, especially old traveling couples, now jacket-

and vestless as they fuss shoeless in stocking feet, turn belts,
wallets in their hands as if newly invented things. Torture


to wait by the conveyor, watch the wife pair and unpair
their shoes, zip and unzip her carry-on, which she wanted
People on couch
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