Green-Wood

by Andrew E. Colarusso

Photo Credit: Ashton Gooding

After photography by Ashton Gooding
For Dr. Diana Cruz

What an infant learns crying incunabula
divorced for days from its ill mother
no nurse night after night for nights on end
is that no one will save you. No one

Will give you quarter or quell the nausea
of now being alive and apart from the source
of your sustenance. The hours drone on
and one gets used to the cold which becomes

The first condition of hope—long-suffering against
silence that teaches you to ask after others
in need, dress a wound, recognize the sound
of ghosts from their graves responding no

One cared to save us. But here you are.
Somehow alive. In the arms that cradled you
through the bleary dark pressed to the perfect
cadence of its eternal heart, wrapped in its wings.

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Andrew E. Colarusso was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He received his B.A. from NYU (2011) and his MFA from Brown University (2013). He is author of a handful of idiosyncratic books exploring the uncanny, the impossible, the dispossessed, and the beauty of the mundane.

Ashton Gooding is a photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. His work focuses on human interactions within a populous city. The overall theme of each collection gives the subject a constructive platform, while soliciting positive feelings from the viewer.

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