• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

New Orleans Review

Since 1968

  • home
  • Current Issue
    • Poetry
    • Interviews
    • Essays
    • Fiction
  • Past Issues
  • Book Reviews
  • Art
  • Interviews
  • Archive
    • Poetry
    • Fiction
    • Essays
  • About
  • Submit
You are here: Home / 46 / The Rainy Season

The Rainy Season

46, Poetry by Anne Barngrover

raises up animals from their water houses:
            birds like wet laundry, alligators close enough to appear
long-lashed and serene, Florida chicken turtle

            bundled in the apartment parking lot
as though delivered by drone. It’s a choking hazard
            down here, May to October, a mouthful

of black grapes, head rush of supernatural and melodrama,
             and when the crepe myrtle’s bubblegum wig
starts to shake, I can’t foretell

            what may or may not descend. What ruin
or what cleanse. Lightning skewers a sun halo,
            toothpick in hors d’oeuvres. And just today I saw

the place where a rainbow ends. It’s mostly green
            graphic arc and intersection, fleeting
as a page in the Book of Common Prayer I mark and enter

            when the apocalypse in my brain arrests me
that in light we may see light and I feel a desire to be lifted,
             too. I want my heart to be drawn

and my imagination filled with what comes
             after mercy—storm, flood, an ending not
in archway but in smokescreen

            where sunset amends the rain
clouds like you’ve never seen a fire without flames.
            That’s when the sweetest blue

yawns in soft pearls—color that can only be painted,
            that belongs deep inside a seashell
or a body in love, tenderness I almost can’t believe I deserve.

 

ANNE BARNGROVER‘s most recent poetry collection, Brazen Creature, was published with The University of Akron Press in 2018 and was a finalist for the 2019 Ohioana Award for Poetry. She is an assistant professor of English and Creative Writing at Saint Leo University, where she is on faculty in the low-residency MA program in Creative Writing, and lives in Tampa, Florida.

Primary Sidebar

Connect with NOR

  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter

Call for Submissions: Special Issue on Iran

Call for submissions by Iranian women (trans & non-binary inclusive) writers. Learn more and submit your work here.

New Orleans Review is delighted to announce the publication of its first book, Interviews from the Edge: 50 Years of Conversations about Writing and Resistance
(Bloomsbury 2019).

Visit the Digital Archive of NOR Print Issues, 1968-2019

Footer

  • About
  • Current
  • Archive
  • Submit
  • Email
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
Loyola University logo
Copyright © 2023 · New Orleans Review
title illustration by Guen Montgomery · site by MJG