Read the winning piece of our 2025 Nonfiction Contest “Through the Mirror” by Jessie Cato selected by Lucy Ives.

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Fall 2023 • Vol. XLV No. 4 • Luminous Gender Vessel |

An Exemplar

Whilst the birds harmoniously deliciate the Air, I learn to open the oven door. Be the leaf, be the leaf, is what I heard in the lizard’s shadow. I don’t know where I have come from, think these leaves I bend my head toward permanently changing. The blue skink thickens under the eave. I am becoming more a mention of shadows than simply their figures. I just now, no, not now, obliterated a number of words placed together like stones in a row. That’s what I do. That and the enemy. So, the truck has finally come, in the hear-dark, to take these unvoiced letters away. My dog is alone. This is all happening, what you think is happening. What you see, what you read, what you think of it, it is happening. Whether the agency’s operator has taken away the package filled with what I begged for a solid hour to be removed from my grass is uncertain. Grass grows in the ruts that cannot be mowed. What we now know and when, is that the unmoving leaf being light-struck is not uncertain. I hear a loud noise hit the window.

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Photo of Theodore Worozbyt

Theodore Worozbyt is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Alabama State Council on the Arts, and the Georgia Council for the Arts. His most recent books are The Rhino Narrative (Cyberwit Press, 2023), Echo’s Recipe (Cyberwit Press, 2022), and Tuesday Marriage Death (Unsolicited Press, 2022). Worozbyt teaches at Georgia State University.

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