This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Full and Plum-Colored Velvet by Anne Graue (Woodley Press 2020).
The Spectrum Glows Brilliant
My mother, Cora, is in flux, pulling
and turning levers and knobs
that don’t seem to do anything.
The pilot said the plane
had been struck by lightning
once but everything was all
right now.
After everything comes stillness.
If only it were true. She finds
it difficult to tell
whether she is alive or not
or if she is part of the bed sheet
covering her, bunched up
around her ankles and pulled
from the foot of the bed
in the night, interrupting sleep,
exposed skin touching air.
Her leg bounces in 16th
notes, her nails bitten, the skin
around them raw. She remembers—
once her bike flipped over
and her mouth hit the ground
and slid, dragging her 8-year-old
body behind her to a stop—
she stopped talking
for months. If she
stayed quiet, maybe
everyone would leave
her alone. The others
would not stop talking,
would not stop telling
her what to do when
she knew what to do
but couldn’t
quite
accomplish it.
Her expertise is living
in the moment, but each moment
is a lifetime: still and prolonged
by the growling and snarling—
it will never stop
until it stops.
The mind is terrible to contemplate.
Mirrors are terrible things
that cannot be trusted,
but people lie all of the time.
The spectrum glows brilliant
in a red/yellow/violet arch
in a field across the street
from The Home Place.
Cora reaches for an antique
hob-nailed bowl of milky blue,
watches it shatter on the floor,
watches her hands pick up the shards
and place them in a cup inside
the old china cabinet, the one
her sister fell into and broke
when she chased her through
the farmhouse with a broom.
She imagines a man walking
in and out with the bowl
in his hand, her breath quicker
each time she tells it and the bowl
transforms into a jar
of buttons, then a bank,
an old and rusted clown
ready for a penny in its mouth.
When death is close all thoughts are of living.
She cannot believe she is safe
in a plane hurtling through
solid turbulent clouds—
living and dying all at once.
Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet (Woodley Press) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press). Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Verse Daily, Poet Lore, One Art, Feral, Canary, The Ilanot Review, Leon Literary Review, SWWIM Every Day, The Museum of Americana, The Wild Word, and Anthropocene Poetry Journal. She has work forthcoming in Spoon River Poetry Review, Does it Have Pockets? and Neologism Poetry Journal. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.
L.M. Cole is a poet and artist residing in North Carolina. She is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Bulb Culture Collective whose writing and art have been published with The Pinch Journal, The McNeese Review, Five South, The Dodge, and many other excellent journals and magazines. She can be found on Twitter @_scoops__ and more of her work can be found at linktr.ee/lmcole
