Anna Rose Welch

cantfindit

Anna Rose Welch (?-present) received her MFA from Bowling Green State University. Her work has been published in The Kenyon Review Online and The Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal among others and she currently lives in Erie, Pennsylvania where she is the chief editor of a pharmaceutical publication and a violinist in the Erie Chamber Orchestra. Source

After You Left

I said fuck it and let another man name me his ship-

wreck; call my arms and legs masts

snapping apart in his wake.

 

For every piece I gave him, I demanded a secret

about the ocean. Outside my window,

an oak tossed its helicopters to the black roof.

 

He whispered: Listen. Something’s devouring the leaves.

Like this, he said, searching my mouth until I tasted salt.

Like this, his palms said, sinking to my hipbones

 

and the oak’s branches, swollen with wind, finished

their desperate scratching on the window.

Like this, he said again and again

 

and again his fingers forged riverbeds between mine,

and his breath came and went in the canals of my ear

like tides crossing each other, until all I could imagine

 

about ocean was that it once was still

water interrupted by something heavy

collapsing into it.

Published:

2014

Length:

Regular

Literary Movements:

Contemporary

Anthology Years:

2020

Themes:

Love & Relationships

Literary Devices:

Alliteration

the repetition of the same letter or sound at the beginning of words appearing in succession

Epizeuxis

words or phrases repeated one after another in quick succession

Imperative

an instruction or a command

Metaphor

a comparison between two unrelated things through a shared characteristic

Repetition

a recurrence of the same word or phrase two or more times

Simile

a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”