by Emily Rose Cole

When you called my classroom safe for vulnerability,
my blood hitched. I could think of nothing except how safe
you aren’t. The old stories oversimplify—claws & isolation
in the forest, lanterns & family in the village. As if families
can’t sour, or protract their own claws. As if were ever

such a place as safe. But while I’ve got you still
under this scant protection, my sonnet’s salted circle,
I’ll give you my still-unmastered secret: you don’t owe anyone
your trauma. You can write it plain, or chiaroscuroed,

or not at all. Write, if you want, about tulips or tetherball
or the after-scent of a peach orchard, post-storm. Don’t
be afraid to take joy by the forelock & stroke her rippling neck.

This is your chance to slake the fox’s unreachable longing,
to hang the grapes at eye-level, ripe & incalculably sweet.

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Emily Rose Cole is the author of the collection Thunderhead and the chapbook Love & a Loaded Gun. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2018, Poet Lore, and the Los Angeles Review, among others. She holds a PhD in poetry and disability studies from the University of Cincinnati.

by Emily Rose Cole

He will say strong. They always do. The ending’s spoiled.

Spoiled, too, as I learned today from my doctor, probably my spine.

Or, more technically, my thoracic spinal nerves. In one of them,

my doctor thinks, a lesion. Bright erasure. Corrosive smudge.

(Why do I always want these new eyelets in my brain to suggest

light?) Just a little one, she postulates, pre-MRI. A little one

that could turn python, swallow whole my feet. With MS, it’s impossible

to predict an ending—my checkup tests a catalogue of potential

losses: Balance. Reflexes. Vision. Memory. Strength. She holds down

my arms one by one. Push back, she says, and I do. For now. At home,

unfocused on my work or my country, I prime my abdomen

for injection. The drug burns its acidic promise, leaves its welting,

subcutaneous kiss. Stay strong, my dad incants through the phone.

I decline. On Capitol Hill, the President rises to a paroxysm of applause. 

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Emily Rose Cole is the author of a chapbook, Love & a Loaded Gun, from Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Best New Poets 2018, Spoon River Poetry Review, The Pinch, and Southern Indiana Review, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is pursuing a PhD in Poetry and Disability Studies at the University of Cincinnati. You can reach her via her website at emilyrosecolepoetry.com.