What an embarrassment, what kind of grace

By Rose Auslander

thanking the tall maple

over on Sea Street,

it was or it wasn’t

me hearing waves crash

in the high branches

swaying, wanting

to swim up

in the wind—

it understands, the maple

silent as that man,

chain saw in hand, hacks away

pruning branches one by one,

it is or it isn’t me it hurts,

shrinking.

shortlink: dogb.us/grace

Rose Auslander, whose last name means “foreigner,” is a Piltdown Review Featured Poet for May 2019. Her book Wild Water Child won the 2016 Bass River Press Poetry Contest. Her chapbooks include Folding Water, Hints, and The Dolphin in the Gowanus, and her poems have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, Berkeley Poetry Review, Scoundrel Time, Love’s Executive Order, and A & U: America’s AIDS Magazine. Rose has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has read her poems on NPR. She is Poetry Editor of Folded Word Press, and she earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College.

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