Ladies of the Sarasota SewerBy Jackie Wangin those dayswe ate garbage for every meali dove in the dumpsters withthe atlanta boysgot chubby on a bucketof expired breakfast barsfine dining was stealingcontinental breakfastat all the nearby hotelsfilching lukewarm dannonyogurts and bananasfrom the mediocre spreadonly once we were caughtthey gave us a billwe had no moneyi said i would go hometo try to get some moneyand when i leftthey let you go without payingthinking i had left you in the lurchall the love i see is gonewe lived on fumesthe adrenalin of ourbreaking bonesAnne Boyer is a poet and an essayist. Her memoir about cancer and care, “The Undying,” won a 2020 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Jackie Wang is a poet, a scholar, a multimedia artist and an assistant professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California, where she researches race, surveillance technology and the political economy of prisons and police. She is the author of “Carceral Capitalism” (Semiotext(e), 2018), the poetry collection “The Sunflower Cast a Spell to Save Us From the Void” (Nightboat Books, 2021), which was a National Book Award finalist, and the forthcoming experimental essay collection “Alien Daughters Walk Into the Sun” (Semiotext(e), 2023).

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