Immigrant

New lamb, slick with amniotic fluid

Clings to her old world

She can’t bear the loss of that

perfect roundness,

of her delicate, self-sustaining planet.

She’ll go on mourning

Hope was the cruelest thing you could’ve given me.

Winter’s light does not retract,

           [sober judge, surgeon’s knife]

All her syrupy epiphanies

Lose glint.

She’s a shorn sheep, a newly-bobbed heretic

jilted revolutionary at Red Square

hearing all her words turn traitor

Her turncoat friends keep marching.

You could, she says, for someone.

              [not me.]

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Yael Veitz is a New York-based writer whose work has been published in Poetry South and Sheila-na-gig, among others. Her work reflects her geographically diverse background, her work in mental health, and, occasionally, her love for her cats. Her debut poetry collection, Wilder Centuries, was published in 2022 by Fifth Wheel Press.