Kimberly Grey is the author of The Opposite of Light, winner of the 2015 Lexi Rudnitsky First Book Prize, and Systems for the Future of Feeling (Persea, 2020). The recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship in Umbria, Italy, she is a doctoral student in comparative literature and creative writing at the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches.

Unsystem the System

by Kimberly Grey

We don’t say we are armed when we mean
our arms. We don’t say
                          we are armed.

Though our arms are real,
             they are really arms,
                           and we could use them
to disarm ourselves now.
             We could use them
             to squeeze or hold or load
                          not a gun, not a gun,
             please not another gun.
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