room held together with string

Lauren Smothers

woman holding a camera

holding me tie dye


cardboard ash streak

open the door where are the children


let the snake drop

into the hall way craft


paper ark I chew through

to make room for my name


fluorescent garden bug

spray & cologne outside


the pine tree didn’t catch

my hands

Lauren Smothers lives in Jackson, Tennessee, where she owns Light Trap Books. She is a graduate of the MFA program in creative writing from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and has had poems and photography published in Appalachian Review, Juke Joint, storySouth, and elsewhere.