Emily Rose Cole

Poetry

Emily Rose Cole is the author of Love & a Loaded Gun, a chapbook of persona poems in the voices of mythological and historical women, published in 2017 by Minerva Rising Press. She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets. Her poetry has appeared in American Life in Poetry, Best New Poets 2018, Carve, and River Styx, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and is a PhD candidate in Poetry and Disability Studies at the University of Cincinnati, where she is a Taft Fellow.

 

Stricken Ghazal

        “STRIKE until the parents and children are reunited.” – Diane Seuss via Twitter, June 20, 2018 Strike until the world is resolved. Strike until the children are returned. Strike with the intent to abolish. Strike until our tongues grow strange. Until each voice clarions Strike! Strike! Strike! Strike! Hear me: I do not mean to say rally. A walk out, a die-in, is not enough. I mean strike like a mamba. Like a pandemic. Like a clock gonging the next hour that the lost lives won’t get back. Strike the word again, unless preceded by never—as if we could ever unspool the long white entrails of cruelty, could strike it from our books. No. Cruelty’s record remains, no matter what’s written, its imprint stark as the streak on a struck child’s cheek. What must we bargain with, you coal-hearted men? Tell me. What deal must we strike?

“ Despite the strangely prescient pandemic simile, I actually drafted this ghazal in June of 2018. The Diane Seuss tweet in the epigraph was the impetus for the poem, since it gave me ‘strike’ as a refrain word, but the beating heart of this ghazal is grief over cruelties too big to counter by myself. I wrote this poem to remind myself that there are ways to transform anger into change through collective action. It took me over a year to figure out how to end the poem. I wanted it to end cleanly, to point toward obvious change. Ultimately, a request for a bargain—the end of a strike—was the best that I could do. I hope that, as country, we can collectively do much better. ”