Bedroom still in half-light, I look

from the small southern window

for signs of morning. But late snow

has pulled a blanket up over

the eaves, dropped a kerchief

of white on the new-green

forsythia. Lilac crocuses,

too numerous to count, huddle

like aimless soldiers in a field

beside the cemetery. Together

they shrug the flakes loose

from their shoulders, shake

the soft bells of their heads:

seventeen days of living

& trying to number the dead.


Julie Phillips Brown in a blue and gold dress, seated at a silver café table, writing.

Julie Phillips Brown is an interdisciplinary poet, visual artist, literary critic, and editor. She is the author of The Adjacent Possible (Green Writers Press, 2021), winner of the Hopper Poetry Prize, and a recipient of the Freund Prize from Cornell University. Her writing appears in Ariadne, Borderlands, Columbia Poetry Review, Crab Orchard Review, Denver Quarterly, interim, Plume, The Rumpus, Twyckenham Notes, Vassar Review, Yemassee, and elsewhere. She lives in Lexington, Virginia, where she teaches creative writing, literature, and studio art. Find her at tactualpoiesis.com.