National Poetry Month: Ansel Elkins

The Fire Men

The Price of Eggs

We wanted our white shoes on the asphalt, unmuddied
by floodwaters
licking the rim of river
banks, we wanted our houses
enclosed with polite fences & leaf-blown
yards of authoritarian grass,
we wanted the dreams
but didn’t want the dandelions
growing wild with delighted bees,
we wanted the candy-red strawberries
but didn’t want the brown
hands that picked them,
we wanted a photo of us
looking happy & free
surrounded by beautiful things,
we wanted white eggs & white fences
holding in the bone-ash hills,
we walked the smooth sidewalk
in our new shoes through
the quiet neighborhood,
blood in our tracks 
all the way home.

***

Author photograph courtesy of Ansel Elkins

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Ansel Elkins is from Talladega, Alabama. Her first book, Blue Yodel, won the 2014 Yale Younger Poets Prize. Her poems have appeared in The American Scholar, The Atlantic, The Believer, LA Review of Books Quarterly, The New York Review of Books, Oxford American, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, and others. She has been the recipient of a “Discovery”/Boston Review Poetry Prize, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, North Carolina Arts Council, Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, and the James Merrill House. She teaches creative writing at Berea College, and is the 2025–2026 Amy Lowell Poetry Traveling Scholar.

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