Poem For Rosanne
After Rosanne Cash
Rosanne, you are even more beautiful with wrinkles
in your skin. Sometimes, you look like your father.
You are not your father. You are not your mother.
Your mother’s name was Vivian. She was younger
than I when she married your father, who is dead.
My father is dead too, but we never got to write a song together.
Songs became my mother’s after my father died.
I ached for seven years, and then I turned sixteen
and I loved you, a woman, the way a sixteen-year-old-loves.
I took you with with me on the bus, Rosanne.
I've never been to Tennessee or Barcelona,
never done my share of traveling. Just of walking
by the river like a sad old folk song.
A river runs through me too,
Rosanne. Not the same river, but with water just as thick
come September. When our fathers still are dead,
our mothers still our mothers. I plan to crawl
outside these walls in a boat of my own skin.
Maybe I’ll see you there, 500 miles away.
Rachel Evelyn Sucher is a queer-identified Vermont writer, activist, performer, horsewoman, and intersectional feminist. Her poems have been shortlisted for the International Literary Award (Rita Dove Award in Poetry) and the Dan Veach Prize for Younger Poets, and longlisted for the Brett Elizabeth Jenkins Poetry Prize. Rachel is the founder & editor-in-chief of COUNTERCLOCK literary & art journal, an editor at Sooth Swarm Journal, a social media manager at Half Mystic publishing house & literary journal, and a founding member and editor at Mandatory Assembly literary journal. A mentee in the Adroit Journal Summer Mentorship Program and the Glass Kite Anthology Summer Writing Studio, she has also attended the New England Young Writers' Conference at Bread Loaf and the Champlain College Young Writers' Conference. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tinderbox, Dream Pop Journal, and Rising Phoenix Review, as well as the anthology Destigmatized: Voices for Change from Madness Muse Press. Rachel is also a 2017-18 Trevor Project National Youth Ambassador. When she isn’t wrestling writer’s block or the patriarchy, Rachel can be found snuggling puppies, making music, and overthinking in her nerdy poet's notebook.