my mother called me chickadee my mother called me
sweetpea my mother lost her hair and all her strength
and then my mother lost her life / physics says she’s
still around: her particles her energy / my grieving
brain imagines it will find her and then imagines that
it does / my mother was fundamental and then
foundational: my model of the world my sense of
regulation emotional conditional entropy
conservation / my mother called me chickadee my
mother called me sweetpea my mother slowly
softened and then my mother blurred / my mother
called me sugafoot my mother called me hers
Ashley Seitz Kramer has an MFA in writing from Vermont College and a PhD in education and social justice from the University of Utah. Her creative work has been published in over 35 literary journals and won numerous awards, including the Ruth Stone Prize, the Robert and Adele Schiff Award, and the Mountain West Writers' Award. Her first book, Museum of Distance (2015), won the Zone 3 Press First Book Award. Her second book, Proxemics, was a finalist for the 2025 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and is forthcoming from Parlor Press in 2026.
