Brooke Mitchell

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The Spring After

Did we ask for ashes?
Day blisters.

From this house,
Love calls us walking the swell.

Noon is just the place
where grass stops sticking to your feet.

Our questions fester.
Sundrops yellow the yard.

Grass stops our feet
where I bleached your light.

With your light’s pitch dropped,
we stop living all-gone.

Noon is just the place
we stop living all-gone & ask
if we asked for ashes.

Hear the Morning Doors

To pluck time
from day, cut open under
east’s blue,

we moon
-chilled sheets
on lines to pray.

Bugs emptied their
hunger on our face. To face
the slow starve of rising

ruddy morning. We pour milk
in your cereal
& lace your boots.

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Brooke Mitchell is a northeastern gardener-poet with an Appalachian upbringing. A New York University MFA Candidate in Poetry, she has received funding from the Fine Arts Work Center and placed in the 2024 AWP Intro Journals Project. Find her work at Exacting Clam, Santa Clara Review, and more.

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