Hello contributors and fans of Little Rose!

This post is long overdue. Little Rose is closed to new submissions and will not be publishing any more work. Thank you to everyone who trusted us with their talent. The site will remain up as a home for your work.

by Gaby Garcia

the sky is blue butter and his eyes are bulging
at the crossroads because he’s been driving
so many days he says he dreamt in blacktop 
at the Holiday Inn Express and his feet churned
in the stiff sheets reaching for pedals. He says I fell
asleep in my winter coat like a child in from the snow
and he unzipped me, talked me into my nightshirt
but I don’t remember. We are unshowered, we eat up
time with I’m Thinking Of Somebody. I stump him 
with Monica Lewinsky and he tries to trick me
by picking God and making me work for it. 
Do they live in America? Not exactly.
Do I know them? Not personally.
I roll the window down and stick my head 
out like a dog, let the cold rip out an eyelash.
I tell him about the old woman in the park
back home who wears chunky jewels and stripes
and talks about sex. How it isn’t a joke 
even though  everybody thinks so. You’ll be like that,
he says,  and it won’t be funny.
I can imagine touching your skin. 
 
AUTHOR
Gaby Garcia is a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet whose work has appeared in North American Review, Iowa Review, and elsewhere. She is a James Hearst Poetry Prize finalist, “Best of the Net” nominee, founder of the podcast On Poetry, and served as a Lucie Brock-Broido Teaching Fellow at Columbia University, where she received her MFA in poetry. She lives in Brooklyn.

by Patricia Ndombe

You cannot save me
when I am in bed
overthinking     alone .

The seven deadly sins
have found an eighth.

AUTHOR
Patricia Ndombe is currently an undergraduate poet at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC pursuing a major in English and Creative Writing. She is shaped by a family precisely half African and half African-American. She enjoys writing poetry as a creative outlet that enables her to reflect the world around her, escape the troubles of life, or look at it through another lens. Many of her poems were inspired while struggling with periods of identity uncertainty during her first two years of college, and this turbulent time period has given way to many others.
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by Hannah Price

this is because i want to fit together with you like swans,
because when neither of us speak you can hear the grass growing
without putting your ear to the ground:
 
your throat has my nose pressed to it;
beneath the line where our skin meets is a yawning expanse, 
and if i close my eyes i can see 
the shifting immaterial of the earth, brown and black,
breathing because you are breathing.
your breathing is not like grass growing 
but i know they are happening from the same place, at the same time
and if i listen long enough i can hear
a heartbeat echoing in your collarbone, like something speaking underground.
if i breathe as the grass grows i can see everything from here;
unending ground that seeks
the space below your head. 
 
and when i pause it's dark enough to see the words collect, 
small and distant
in my chest
like chicken bones at the bottom of a well



AUTHOR
Hannah Price is a writer and student living in Chicago. She is pursuing nothing!