Brynne Rebele-Henry is a poet who maps the body’s horizon with a surveyor’s prism stick, and plums the emotional lanternfish of the deep like Jacques Cousteau. Who is the mighty wielder of this pen, this Brynne? Some like to say a fresh new voice, but there’s something wizened here in this poet, something that cannot be bound by our notions of time, something that might only be gleaned in the melting glacier of the “beautiful cold.” Enjoy.
Love Poem for Ash & Snow
Imagine we are in the fields where we spent our girlhood
With dirt and horses and the sugary sick of honeysuckle.
Imagine we are again good.
Imagine the sky is not a broken body on the horizon.
Imagine I am a thing of beauty.
Imagine I have not learned of the ice crack of being backhanded.
Imagine the snow I once swallowed is still pure bleachness.
Imagine the red on my hands turned to ice.
Once the snow melted the ash took over
And we were nothing but a bruised skyline and gray ice.
Once my hands were the color of blood.
Once I called your name until my voice gave out.
I promise I will continue to call for you.
I promise I will keep my love for you like a broken building.
I promise that one day we will be nothing but beautiful cold.
Brynne Rebele-Henry’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction have appeared in such journals as Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, The Boiler, Fiction International, Rookie, The Volta, and So to Speak, among other places. Her writing has won numerous awards, including the 2015 Louise Louis/Emily F. Bourne Poetry Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2016 Adroit Prize for Prose. She is a founding editor of Fissure, a magazine dedicated to young LGBT+ writers and artists. Her book Fleshgraphs appeared from Nightboat Books in September 2016. She was born in 1999 and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia.
