Anne with an E | April Michelle Bratten

   April Michelle Bratten's latest book is the Anne of Green Gables inspired chapbook, Anne with an E (dancing girl press 2015). Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Southeast Review, Zone 3, Gargoyle, decomP, Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and Thrush Poetry Journal, among others. She is the editor-in-chief of Up the Staircase Quarterly, and a contributing editor at Words Dance Publishing where she writes the article "Three to Read."  She currently lives in Minot, North Dakota.       The Winter of Anne She is fashioned from the sand of the island, perplexed by the sea inside of her. She will never know a gun. She brings the books of Anne in her long arms, a name to hover next to the nest of light-orange that changes above pale thighs; her nipples push the lace. She carries Jesus in the puff of her sleeve, lays bare the wild white flower of her skin to Him, arrives in bright sound, but when it winters, the white leaves her body. Thin hands scratched by stiff wool, toes strangled