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Travis Nichols was born in Iowa in 1979. He is the author of two poetry collections, Iowa and See Me Improving (Copper Canyon Press, 2010), and the novel Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder, a sequence of prose vignettes that explore midwestern adolescence. Nichols lives in Chicago.

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The New Privacy

by Travis Nichols
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Heart full of helium,
tongue full of copper,
I ask if you are all right—“Are you
okay?”—until you can be nothing
but not all right, not okay.

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