This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Full and Plum-Colored Velvet by Anne Graue (Woodley Press 2020).
Stuck in the Frame
The face in the mirror looked like a colossal junkyard:
swamps and one broken-down fragment, a hotchpotch.
I glanced down at tiny black shapes swarming instead
of sleeves at the shoulder—floppy wings. I’d forgotten
my bathrobe, myself. The world was a lampshade.
A wan reflection ghosted over the landscape. My cheeks
touching, rather spectacular, would carry me off. White
plastic sunglasses kept my face from disturbing my lips
as I negotiated lawn sprinklers and tennis rackets,
the breath of pine wilderness, the domesticated blood.
The pears were unripe. I spoke through my teeth.
A summer calm laid slippery and clean, like death.
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
