Casey Clague is a working-class writer completing graduate work at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he won the Kogan Award for literary criticism. The co-founder of dialectipoetics.com and Read Herring, a live literary series in Tampa, his poems appear in Burrow Press, Grist, New Limestone Review, Permafrost, and elsewhere.

BACK OF THE ENVELOPE

I CAN'T TALK ABOUT OUTER SPACE

By CASEY CLAGUE

at the company banquet; with the velvet drapes drawn; while most here would rather

pretend space is a backdrop painted for earth