This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Rupture by Adrie Rose (Gold Line Press 2023).
The Cello
As if I had only heard music through a fuzzy radio,
and suddenly found myself in the middle of the orchestra
with the timpani vibrating up through my feet, and above all
the piccolo soaring toward its peak. I felt every small
movement. I kne whow the unbroken pond feels when the stone
enters, the undulation of each ripple towards shore. For days,
when I thought of you, my hand went to my throat,
my body vibrating, like the cello when the soloist
has set down her bow — polished with sweat,
the strings still humming, see how even the air
around them shimmers.
Adrie Rose is a poet and editor. Her work recently appeared at Poets.org, The Baltimore Review, Nimrod, the Ploughshares blog & more. Her poem “flare” won the 2022 Anne Bradstreet Prize with the Academy of American Poets, and she won the the Eleanor Cederstrom Prize, and the Mary Augusta Jordan Prize in 2022. Her poem “The Anthropocene” was nominated for a 2020 Pushcart Prize and she won the Elizabeth Babcock Poetry Prize, the Ethel Olin Corbin Prize, and the Gertrude Posner Spencer Prize in 2021. She has work forthcoming in anthologies with Porkbelly Press and Anhinga Press. She studied creative writing at Smith College, Bennington College and the SC Governor’s School for the Arts & Humanities. She is currently writing a novel and finalizing a poetry manuscript.
Joey Gould, who served as 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), along with transfinity (forthcoming from Lambhouse Books). Their recent work appears in Solstice, Memezine, and Defunkt Magazine’s Surreal Confessional Anthology. They write book reviews as Poetry Editor for Drunk Monkeys, and have also placed reviews in Glass: A Journal of Poetry and the Sundress blog.
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