Rose Auslander
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.
What an embarrassment, what kind of grace
Thanking the tall maple over on Sea Street, it was or it wasn’t me hearing waves crash in the high branches.
The Foreigners
They came from a shtetl they swore didn’t deserve a name. The youngest kept finding stray stones in their pockets.
On reading “7-Year-Old Girl Starves in U.S. Border Patrol Custody”
I heap my family’s plates as if that would feed her. But who can chew? Anyone can smell the whitethorn acacia.
His Sculpture
O to just wash it clean, white as the shelf it sits on, that thing he’d put up on a pedestal—a misshapen bicycle seat, swollen coffee bean.
Ship of Fools: Surviving Fragment of Triptych
And what remains of us? A plateful of cherries spilled, half-eaten, a breast forgotten, dangling from a torn bodice.
