I drafted "Ground Zero" in 2024, while spending a month out west with my mom, who’d been having serious health issues, but intermittently enough that she insisted on continuing to live alone, with minimal in-home care. As I read this poem now, after her death in March, it seems like I was already feeling some kind of countdown, imagining us suspended in the space-time I tried to describe in the poem’s last lines.

Liz Ahl is the author of A Case for Solace (2022), winner of the 2023 New Hampshire Literary Award in Poetry. Her most recent chapbook is A Stanza is a Place to Stand, published in 2023 by Seven Kitchens Press. She lives in Holderness, New Hampshire.

W: https://lizahl.com/ X: @surlypages B: @surlyacres