By Kelly Rowe

Featured Art: In Remembrance Of by Brooke Ripley

                                          Turku, 1962

Out the window of the tram
stone buildings, cobblestone streets,

the sitter handed back the apple
core for me to eat.

Now, I know her children
went hungry in the war;

then, I understood nothing;
I was four.

But sixty years on, I remember
her hiss—“finish it!”

And how the seeds and stem
caught in my throat,

how I coughed, how I choked,
how I sat silent,

looking out at the snow
in triumph.

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Kelly Rowe’s collection, Rise Above the River, won the Able Muse Book Award, and is forthcoming in 2022. She’s also the author of two chapbooks, Child Bed Fever (forthcoming, Seven Kitchens Press), and Flying South on the Back of a Dove, (Texas Review Press, 2019). She has published in 32Poems, Massachusetts Review, Salamander, and New Letters. She lives in Flagstaff, Arizona, and works as a volunteer attorney, representing undocumented women.