On Rand McNally's World | Rachel J. Bennett

  Rachel J. Bennett grew up in Rock Island, Illinois. She received a BA in English from Grinnell College and studied at Trinity College, Dublin, as part of the University of Iowa’s Irish Writing Program. She pursues poetry without an MFA. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in journals including Big Lucks, BOAAT, Bodega, Five Quarterly, Pith, Really System, Salt Hill Journal, Similar:Peaks::, Queen Mob’s Teahouse, Rattle, Sixth Finch, Spittoon, and Vinyl Poetry. She has won awards through Bayou Magazine and Smartish Pace and been a Poet of the Week through Brooklyn Poets. Her grandparents brought her to New York City when she was 10, and she knew she would find a way back.     Farewell, Antarctica   Floating is both less and more than our hopes for it.   Here is the foregone death that sees our own, fortunes read in milk crates, teeth and wedding bands.   Seas rising to cover the things we couldn’t take.   Familiar, lost shapes: a man, a woman recumbent beneath a white sheet.