I have trouble with places and people that do not need me. There are no important decisions to be made overseas except for where to have a cup of coffee and what museum to go into. Even there, the danger exists that a painting will appear before me that holds a complete thought, one more round and globe-like than my own, which is always hairline-fractured with a tendril of Central America scratched right off. I will find myself in a new reality and there will be no returning to the old one, hence no one to care for the pets. Starving cats are no basis for a moral existence, even one inspired by a luminous row of Vrubels in the basement of the Estonian State Museum. I cannot take any more animals in, but I must feed the ones that I have.

Julie Gard’s

collection of prose poems, Home Studies (New Rivers Press, 2015), was a finalist for the 2016 Minnesota Book Award and winner of the 2013 Many Voices Project. Previous publications include two chapbooks, Obscura: The Daguerreotype Series (Finishing Line Press) and Russia in 17 Objects (Tiger’s Eye Press), as well as prose poems and short fiction in 50 or so journals and anthologies. She lives in Duluth, Minnesota and teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Superior.

Author’s website: www.juliegard.com