This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Full and Plum-Colored Velvet by Anne Graue (Woodley Press 2020).
Do Not Resuscitate
You will want to, but don’t.
Guilt is a gritted stone caught
in a sieve along with life’s leftovers—
I can drag it all behind me.
Open the just-in-case Word
doc so you know what I want.
Delete my Facebook page,
my Twitter account.
Plant geraniums and sunflowers
and tulips wherever you live,
a begonia or rose bush if you have
room and need something to tend.
Burn all of the notebooks—listen
to the songs on my birthday playlist.
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
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