By Jessy Randall

We were talking about words
we didn’t like. One of us
was making a list, and we all
wanted our words on it.

“Leverage” came up, and the
overuse of “awesome.”
(We were distracting ourselves
from the reason we were together—

or not distracting, exactly, but
giving ourselves a breather
from grieving and thinking about loss.
We were in town for a funeral.)

My turn came and I didn’t
want to say, didn’t want my mouth
to make the word, but I screwed up
my courage and said it: “meatball.”

The others laughed, not at my word, I think,
but at the face I made when I said it.
The conversation turned to social justice,
but “meatball” had been said aloud

and it imbued the rest of the visit,
for me, with ridiculousness, and maybe,
much as I hate “meatball”—my god—
with hope.

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Jessy Randall’s poems, stories, and comics have appeared in McSweeney’s, Poetry, Nature, Scientific American, and Women’s Review of Books. Her latest poetry collection is Mathematics for Ladies: Poems on Women in Science (MIT, 2022). A sequel, The Path of Most Resistance, will come out in 2025. She is a librarian at Colorado College and her website is bit.ly/JessyRandall.