A woman
(we’ll call her Karen)
calls the Parks Department

asks

can you remove
all the seagulls
from Westchester Lagoon?



Ray Ball prefers whiskey to vodka. She is a history professor, an editor at Juke Joint and Coffin Bell, and the author of the chapbooks Tithe of Salt (Louisiana Literature, 2019) and Lararium (Variant Lit, 2020). Her poems have been nominated for Pushcart and Best of the Net and have appeared in numerous journals, including Waccamaw, Orange Blossom Review, and Cease, Cows.