Anne Marie Rooney won the 2009 Iowa Review Award for Poetry and the 2010 Gulf Coast Poetry Prize. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets 2008, and her poem “After It” won Second Place in Narrative’s First Annual Poetry Contest. Born and raised in New York City, Rooney completed her MFA at Cornell, where she is a lecturer of English.

Dirty Story

by Anne Marie Rooney

2.

I look out from my spire of fuss and buzzkill. A carriage is awaking on the hill. The sun shifts and maybe it is you come for the annual tap. Last year you rode right up and with your spurs aglitter clicked your tongue. Did you think I was a home? I would buckle under you? I look again and the angle of everything has changed. There is no sun here and I am the sun, that starched, appalled. The something I have become is truly unbecoming.

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