O

By Kai Carlson-Wee

Sometimes it’s enough to watch a single ant
on a single leaf
on a single branch of a mulberry tree
struggle to carry a single wing
of a dragonfly to the top.
The rain has, for the moment, stopped.
I peel an orange rind,
waiting.

Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). He received his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize from Crazyhorse, and the Editor's Prize from The Missouri Review. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Ploughshares, AGNI, and The Southern Review. He lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.