This selection, chosen by guest editor Joey Gould, is from Rupture by Adrie Rose (Gold Line Press 2023).
Throat of the Blossom
Before the swelling buds,
the thrusting leaves of crocus,
there is the fruitless
winter, empty sheets
of snow upon snow.
What wants to come through,
will. Here
is a woman
putting on a dress
for no lover
but the first heats
of spring.
Who knows
what happens next —
the fallow field touched
by wind, the throat
of the blossom brushed
by the pollen heavy bee.
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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