Emily Rose Cole - Two Poems

Ceremony for a Friend’s Joyous News

You don’t have cancer. It's been months

& still we delight in this ritual of reminding.

We recall the news so often it’s like punctuation,

first exclamation, then comma, period. Now, a colon:

You don’t have cancer:

The clause’s conclusion fantastically blank

with possibility, as if this invocation

is not just an echo of an absence,

but a promise of an unwritten space

that you, my sparkling friend,

have yet to fill.

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Emily Rose Cole is the author of Thunderhead (University of Wisconsin Press) and Love & a Loaded Gun (Minerva Rising). She has received awards from Jabberwock Review, Philadelphia Stories, The Orison Anthology, and the Academy of American Poets, among others. She holds an MFA from Southern Illinois University Carbondale and PhD in poetry with an emphasis in Disability Studies from the University of Cincinnati, where she teaches creative writing and disability studies.