Anne Graue


Dear Frank

Dear Frank

I couldn’t have known you

your oranges gone moldy

wrapped in fuzzy green

and I miles away

from Fire Island

when I was 4

and you 10 times that.

If only

I’d been older

you’d been younger

we’d’ve had a beer

in the 80s in Brothers Tavern

in Aggieville    REM playing

“So. Central Rain” murmuring

dark     nonthreatening            (I’m sorry)

the oaken tables reckoning

under the occasional

amber damp.


Anne Graue

Anne Graue is the author of Full and Plum-Colored Velvet, (Woodley Press, 2020) and Fig Tree in Winter (Dancing Girl Press, 2017) and has poetry in SWWIM Every Day, Verse Daily, Gargoyle, EcoTheo Review, Flint Hills Review, Feral: A Journal of Poetry and Art, and in print anthologies, including The Book of Donuts (Terrapin Books, 2017) and Coffee Poems (World Enough Writers, 2019). Her book reviews appear in FF2 Media, Adroit, Green Mountains Review, Glass Poetry Journal, and The Kenyon Review. She is a poetry editor for The Westchester Review and on the editorial board at Nimrod International Journal.