"How do you learn to spell?
Blood, sky & the sun,
your own name first,
your first naming, your first name,
your first word."
–from "Spelling" by Margaret Atwood
Nancy Chen Long is a 2017 National Endowment of the Arts fellow and the author of Light into Bodies, winner of the 2016 Tampa Review Prize for Poetry. You'll find her recent work in Crab Orchard Review, Ninth Letter, Alaska Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She works at Indiana University.