Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

Aubade

The night the fascist wins the election
you find yourself swimming in a glass of milk.

You aren’t yourself or you think to yourself
that you are a different kind of yourself.

It’s peaceful, and you notice other people
enjoying the calm of the liquid retreat,

so you wonder if this is why they let
the body snatchers take their places,

why you let one take your place,
let yourself shrink to the size of a bubble

in a glass of milk. In the milky resort,
we clink highballs; watch professionals

in tennis whites smile broadly. You smile
broadly or you imagine yourself

smiling broadly. We listen for news
outside the glass, hear nothing.

Joanna Fuhrman is an Assistant Teaching Professor in Creative Writing at Rutgers University and the author of seven books of poetry, including Data Mind (Curbstone/Northwestern University Press), To a New Era (Hanging Loose Press 2021). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including The Believer, The Baffler, Conduit, Fence, The Georgia Review, and Plume, as well as on the Poetry Foundation and the Academy of American Poets (poem-a-day) websites. Poems have also appeared in Best American Poetry (2023 and 2025), The Pushcart Prize anthology, and The Slowdown podcast. She first published poetry in Hanging Loose Magazine as a teenager and became a co-editor of the press in 2022.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx