February 2026
After Rain
poetry by Emma Aylor
I’m no less pathetic, no less inclined
to its fallacy. The creek’s full
as desire, opaque with it, moving more
than I’ve seen in months;
I dreamed like that and woke every hour
aware of wanting but not for what.
Reflections swim. Sand kicks into my shoes.
Little wind smells like the slow death
of leaves. Creekbed scraped in lines
like I pulled pink down his shoulders.
I’d take a lover here again, but he’d best
be nothing like the last.
Emma Aylor is the author of Close Red Water (2023), winner of the Barrow Street Poetry Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Northwest, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. She lives in Nacogdoches, Texas, where she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Stephen F. Austin State University.