time marches on

by Michelle Trantham time marches on moves between backyard storms and studio apartments, between a grandmother's basement and a Boston fern that outgrows its pot. These poems carry a Midwest inheritance, doppler radar, black-eyed peas, the vocabulary of warning systems learned as kids, into the newer weather of adult life: rejection emails, doomscrolling, a cat's absence still fresh in an apartment built for two. There are little rituals here, small superstitions against a world moving faster than anyone can control, and there is real grief for a grandmother whose only lesson left behind was that time marches on, and nobody knows exactly where. Wry, plainspoken, and unafraid of both bad news and small comforts, this is a collection about living in rented rooms, on borrowed time, in the pause between one storm and the next.