This issue Citron welcomed a new poetry reader, Bobby Morris. Bobby is a Filipino-American writer in Nevada, and his work can be found in Mantis, Pollux Journal, streetcake magazine, and more. It’s been awhile since we’ve had a reader in Poetry, and we’re so glad to have him on the team. Together, we selected eight poems by six poets for our Summer Issue. 

In the heat of the summer, Karl Michael Iglesias takes us outside to the winter cold in “A Poem Not About Me.” He writes: I think I want love to call me inside now,/my chest a radiator steaming, a drumming dove. Also set in winter, “Radiance” by Susan Grimm. In it the speaker recalls marriage and motherhood, finally concluding: We should/ marry only in winter. Clean lines so everyone can see.

David Anson Lee brings us a trio of outdoor poems, “Where the Orchard Ends” and “Instructions from an Owl at Dusk” and “What the Ocean Keeps.” In the first poem, part of its tremendous ending shares this truth of those who grieve: I find you: not whole,/not gone,/but luminous in the pause/where grief learns how to breathe. In “Mutation,” Savannah Slone’s prose poem also addresses grief. She writes, You hear my alarm clock at my side, six feet under.

Anne Yarbrough’s “At the end of the street a bird” opens with a bird in a magnolia tree, just out of reach. This poem inhabits a world somewhere between a dream and a painting, bringing the coolness of whimsy to our summer selections. Also with this same terpene coolness, Jessica Willingham’s prose poem “The Hollyhocks Are Blooming,” imagines an encounter with Georgia O’Keefe. The speaker tells us: I want to crawl inside Georgia O’Keefe’s tunic, smell paint and Santa Fe, hot-bake desert sun, shed snakeskin, tin windmill breeze, lilies.

Warmest wishes,
Angela M. Brommel
Editor-in-Chief
Poetry Editor
The Citron Review