Let everything that has breath praise
my parents thought of compliments
like overpaying or donating an organ
something that made you lose more than you could afford
something where the giving hurt hurt but also lowered you
so that now the person receiving the compliment was standing
on a bucket and looked taller
we don’t lower ourselves i could hear them saying through
their teeth we came to this country never
to lower ourselves again they said as the winch
turned and they disappeared down and down
into the heart’s well
Doritt Carroll is a native of Washington, DC. She received her undergraduate and law degrees from Georgetown University. Doritt is the winner of the 2023 Stephen Meats Poetry Prize. She is also the winner of Harbor Review’s 2020 Laura Lee Washburn chapbook prize for her chapbook A Meditation on Purgatory. Her poems have appeared in Main Street Rag, RHINO, and SWWIM, among others. Her collection GLTTL STP was published by Brickhouse Books in 2013. Her chapbook Sorry You Are Not An Instant Winner was published in 2017 by Kattywompus. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net.