Anne Graue
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Genealogy
Alexander begat Napoleon, begat
agriculture, begat the industrial complex,
and on down to Sylvia who struggled with
the knowledge of all the histories available
and struggled with reconciling living
with survival of the fittest and who left
what she begat in stasis and the new
Plathian language, those jewels she
dug up with her bare hands, her
nails broken and packed with dark brown
dirt, her knuckles bloody and swollen,
her mind racing miles ahead at 400 kph
in a convertible that the Beach Boys
would envy, and no one could stop.
Trying to Make Peace with the Ghost in the Machine
The tech person in charge of the spinal cord stimulator says to try this new setting for a few days.
She says that if I hear owls in the night loud and clear through the window, then the rainy days
must have had no effect.
She asks me what percentage of relief I have, and after I explain how that is not an objective measurement, she asks me to rate my pain from 1-10.
Her understanding is as limited as the number of flowers still blooming in my October yard, as
dense as the leaves piling up in corners, as countable as the days until Halloween.
She explains when to call the doctor in her market research voice reading from a script I’ve memorized.
My expectations are low to the ground, burrowing under traces of mulch and rotting leaves.
She says I might try binge-watching The Crown or Downton Abbey, something British, to keep
my mind off things. Intellectual Valium.
I prefer edibles in a variety of gummy flavors—blueberry is a favorite and masks the taste of
weed better than mango or cherry.
Anne Graue (she/her) is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, (Woodley Press) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press). Find her work in Sundress Publications’ Best-Dressed and Poet Lore, Verse Daily, Spoon River Poetry Review, Gargoyle, and elsewhere. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review.