This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility by Anna Laura Reeve (Belle Point Press 2023).
The Children of Asylum Seekers
Simple removal of child from parents fleeing fire.
Simple wrapping of woman, mother,
man, father, in wire.
Inside white tents, crèches
of brown children mill,
waiting for the feeling of
recognition to flood their bodies.
All we know of our parents is in the body: I knew
my mother’s breast, because it was there that I turned outward
to see the world. It was my floor.
I knew my father’s chest because for a while
my weakness fit there, like a soft body
under hard wing casings.
Anna Laura Reeve is the author of Reaching the Shore of the Sea of Fertility (Belle Point Press, 2023). Winner of the 2022 Adrienne Rich Award for Poetry, selected by American poet Jane Hirshfield, Reeve was also a finalist for the Greg Grummer Poetry Contest, the Ron Rash Award, the Heartwood Poetry Prize, and won the 2024 Emerging Writers Award from the East Tennessee Writers Hall of Fame. Her poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Salamander, Terrain.org, and others. She is a two-time Pushcart nominee, and lives with her daughter and husband near the Tennessee Overhill region, traditional land of the Eastern Cherokee.
Joey Gould, who is Sundress Academy for the Arts Spring 2024 Writer in Residence, wrote The Acute Avian Heart (2019, Lily Poetry Review) & Penitent>Arbiter (2022, Lily Poetry Review), while their recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Meow Meow Pow Pow, Miniskirt Magazine, & Persephone’s Fruit. They also serve as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys.
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