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 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.