This selection, chosen by Guest Curator Amanda Judd, is from For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons by Komal Mathew, released by Zone 3 Press in 2021.
[romantic theme increases in volume and dynamics]
The scene is simple. Two horses fall in love over apples— When I say I want to be consumed, I remember that women die by fire, our women, at higher rates than men. Standing next to a stove, throwing a thousand mustard seeds. I think you know I mean hurry and halt. Take a penny and please leave a penny: charity of mind starts with the benefit of action. See what I did there? I’m still at the beginning of this romance. Tell me that’s the way it works before I go and you go with me, ambitious, to the beginning of many deaths. Who could trust the future with a past like that? Who could see love as anything else than an all-consuming fire?
Komal Mathew is Gujarati-American writer from the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia. A graduate of Georgia Institute of Technology and Sarah Lawrence College, she is the author of For Daughters Who Walk Out Like Sons, which won the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry. She lives with her family in Smyrna, Georgia, where she is the co-founding editor of Josephine Quarterly.
After a 25-year career as a paralegal, Amanda Valerie Judd returned to school to earn her AFA in Creative Writing from Normandale Community College. She is currently attending Southern New Hampshire University working to earn her BFA in Creative Writing – Poetry. In 2020, she won the Patsy Lea Core Prize for Poetry. In 2021, her poem “My Only Label” was nominated for “Best of the Net 2021.” Her work has been published or is forthcoming in PAN-O-PLY Magazine, MockingOwl Roost, Trouvaille Review, Prospectus, and Talking Stick 31.
