Running Away with It by Michelle Bitting

~ ONE ART
Running Away with It My eyes say to my arms, my legs, my knees: we will move like music through the world. We will bend and sway with the trees—an atmospheric river rising, stalling time with our juiciest leaps. They may target our bodies & air, coax monumental melts of glaciers, threaten lunches of government cheese. Still, we swarm, spinning a storm, a choreography of hip things shaking, our riots composed of feet. Rave pirouettes rung with fire. The Waters of March in our toes. A quaking bee-line formation, a renegade dance flooding streets. Lit with love, kindred color, known desire. So it blows. No one needs a weatherman when we are the wind.

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Michelle Bitting was recently named a City of L.A. Department of Cultural Affairs Individual Master Artist Project Grantee and is the author of seven poetry collections, including Nightmares & Miracles (Two Sylvias Press, 2022), winner of the Wilder Prize and named one of Kirkus Reviews 2022 Best of Indie. She won the 2025 Banyan Review Poetry Prize, and her chapbook Dummy Ventriloquist was published in 2024 by C & R Press. Recent poetry, prose, and essays appear on The Slowdown, Thrush, Cleaver, The Poetry Society of New York’s Milk Press, The Glacier, Heavy Feather Review, Split Lip, National Poetry Review, SWWIM, ONE ART, Gargoyle, and is featured as Poem of the Week in The Missouri Review. Her forthcoming collection Ruined Beauty will be published by Walton Well Press in Spring, 2026. Bitting is writing a hybrid novel that centers around Los Angeles and her great grandmother, stage and screen actor Beryl Mercer, and is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Literature at Loyola Marymount University.

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