The Harm

by Anne Boyer

The harm will come: it never doesn't. It will open up our chests and enter there. Some days it will come by fortune, some days by no agent in particular, and sometimes others will bring it to us, either willfully or on accident. Those others might trip, the harm spilling out of their arms onto us. We might all look at each other startled. We might all have the harm then and eyes full of tears.

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Anne Boyer is a Kansas City-based poet and essayist. This piece is excerpted from A Handbook of Disappointed Fate. Anne's Twitter feed is here.