Amanda Maret Scharf & Hannah Smith

Personal Xerox

How many times did you send a drawing through
an outdated machine, 

unanswered? You kept the wires you no longer employed
but couldn’t repurpose. 

You really don’t remember feeding this stenciled upbringing
into the fax machine—the cemetery 

frequented in search of quiet company. You were
waiting on the other end 

of the landline for an answer, the night at the gay bar
in the electric valley. How could you hide 

the wiring that landmarked an adolescence? You couldn’t stop
gorging yourself on sci-fi 

realities copied over in the basement, uninterested
in the original document.

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Amanda Maret Scharf is a poet from Los Angeles. Her poems have been published in Pleiades, Poetry Northwest, The Iowa Review and elsewhere. She is the co-founder of publishing initiative and artist collaboration, mixedgreens. During her MFA at Ohio State, she served as Poetry Editor for The Journal.

Hannah Smith is a writer from Dallas, Texas. She received an MFA in poetry at the Ohio State University, where she served as the Managing Editor of The Journal. Her poems have been published or are forthcoming in Best New Poets, Gulf Coast, Ninth Letter and elsewhere.