Natasha Rao is the author of Latitude, selected by Ada Limón as winner of the 2021 American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in the Nation, American Poetry Review, Yale Review, Poetry Northwest, Narrative, Rattle, and elsewhere. In 2021, Rao received a Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation.
More By This Poet
Witness
I lived on top of the roof, staring at the Jehovah’s Witness
turrets. I lived making up metaphors about the moon
while Bobby balanced a boombox above his shoulders
and squirrels shyly swallowed the spiked heads
of passionflowers, pilfering grape tomatoes and averting
my gaze....
Type to Learn
In fourth grade
they put our hands
under show boxes
to see how fast
we could say:
fox moves quickly I
am Sam: but really
the words they
should have prepared
us to type fast
with our eyes
closed were time
is running out things
are terribly wrong
and I miss you
so much. The...
My Father’s First Night in the National Defense Academy
In these barracks, night speaks another dialect.
No longer does he fall asleep to the smell
of boiling milk or his brother breathing
cigarettes in the dark. He doesn’t yet know
the ways his body will change for a war
that doesn't happen in this...
In my next life let me be a tomato
lusting and unafraid. In this bipedal incarnation
I have always been scared of my own ripening,
mother standing outside the fitting room door.
I only become bright after Bloody Mary’s, only whole
in New Jersey summers where beefsteaks, like baubles,
sag in the yard, where...