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.

The Mercy of Pronouns

by Kimberly Grey

The large difficulty of mercy is that it’s full of people
moving and sometimes you are not one of them.

I say this to him.


What I mean is there’s no interpretable order, no
structure, no owner. No one, holding a flower,
you can predict at your door.
People on couch
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