Census

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss

Have you known the cold tile?

What’s the perfect ratio of clouds to sky?

When have you been desperate in public, unable to hide 
the dry gnaw of circumstance?

In whose voice does your name belong?

Which doors no longer need locks? 

Whose body, whose currency,
whose household?

How far would you travel to be counted? To disappear?

What’s it like to sit still and earn nothing?

Does your body’s value in the economy make you (un)comfortable?

What kind of labor is worth precisely itself?

Have you ever borne witness to another’s humiliation
in public or in private?             Describe. 

What color were your baby’s eyes?

What are your preferred implements for re-collection? 
(for example: shopping, bootstraps mythology, magnets, staring off) 

Who or what have you lost for good?

How neatly does your story fit inside the nation’s favorite plots?         

What sort of power is yours?

Into what animal would you transform your suffering?

How many dancers can whirl in your palm or, if you like, on your skull?

If one flower blooms in your stomach, what is it?

What kind of violence pierces your tongue?

Are you lonely? Are you irreducible? 

Do you prefer light to form a plank, a pond, a lattice, a bolt, a bullet, or otherwise?
What about your higher power?

What sort of presence visits your room, sensed but unseen?

Where do your feet take you when you’re not paying?             

What consolations have you been given?

Makes you laugh every time?

What do you say is the nature of the mysterious electric fire that keeps you?

If you could release yourself and your enemy, would you?

What draws you out into each day?

Please list your strategies for loving this world. 
Anyway. Despite. Even if. 

Cory Hutchinson-Reuss grew up in Arkansas, received her PhD in English from the University of Iowa, and now lives and writes in Iowa City. Her work has appeared in Brink, Slice, Zone 3, The Offing, Pangyrus, Crazyhorse, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for the 2021 Levis Prize from Four Way Books for her manuscript A Koan/An Oak, and a chapbook of poems and visual art made in collaboration with Giselle Simón is forthcoming from PromptPress. She currently serves on the advisory council of Iowa City Poetry and as a poetry reader for The Adroit Journal.