This selection, chosen by guest editor L.M. Cole, is from Full and Plum-Colored Velvet by Anne Graue (Woodley Press 2020).
Somewhere in Kansas
(or a really bad Nebraska) I drank
Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill
in a cherry Cutlass cranked
loud on the interstate, idling
at the drive-in or back behind
the house, with someone older
who worked in a garage, read
Little Women because
I asked him to, pretended to like me
as he described other women
with smooth skin who had ridden
in his car and been afraid
of speed and the sound of sirens.
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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