This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Rupture by Adrie Rose (Gold Line Press 2023).
Spring—& Everyone Seems so Fucking Happy
No seeds to sow.
The taste
of silt. Scorched grass.
My rage?
There is no time,
no cradle for it.
This morning, shaky again,
I drop the spoon, flip
over the bowl of oatmeal
as I try to stir it cool.
Once my living children
are tucked
into school, I return
to the frost forest,
the banks above the ice river
where despair can slip
along, carving
the rocks, sending
moss as messenger
for all that was taken.
I walked where we harvested
wild blueberries, he writes.
The ghost and I
do not write back.
I want my body
before it knew his
body. I gather and weave
what protections
I can — yarrow, knot-
weed, wild rose.
With no harbor
for anger, exhaustion
pulls me down
in its net.
The sheets
are a shroud
and I will sew them closed
with my breath.
I trust no one, especially
not myself anymore. I ask
the land — Bones
of the Mother
I have loved,
open to me.
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.
