Nicole Rollender is the author of the poetry collection Louder Than Everything You Love from Five Oaks Press and four poetry chapbooks. She was the 2017 New Jersey Council on the Arts poetry fellow and a recipient of poetry prizes from Palette Poetry, Gigantic Sequins, CALYX Journal, and Ruminate Magazine. Her work appears in Alaska Quarterly Review, Best New Poets, Ninth Letter, Puerto del Sol, Salt Hill Journal, and West Branch, among many other journals. Rollender is managing editor of THRUSH Poetry Journal and holds an MFA from Pennsylvania State University. She is also cofounder and CEO of Strand Writing Services. Visit her online at www.nicolemrollender.com.
My God, why does the bruised flower inside me cry Open? Shape-shifter birds, my daughter called skyward: flock of Holy Ghosts, can I fly with you? She’s my compass toward paradise. My human will, the only door for evil spirits to enter. Holy the purity of animals in forests and pastures, breath hymning outside my […]
Again, the plague season returns. Again, horses live, and they die. Locusts descend, devour, disperse. All ashes. I watch you in the fields, drifting in and out of hinterland mists. A brindle foal learns to stand. Three times during my second pregnancy, we thought we lost our son—once in Gettysburg’s bee-buzzed peach orchard. How does […]
