(for B.)
Secrets that lips hold back, the body shows.
Be gone, Sun. In moonlight, the body glows.
Rittenhouse sobs he shot in self-defense.
Entry wound in the back, the body knows
Alison Stone
National Ghazal
Teacher back home, maid in America.
He sold tusks and jade in America.
Slumbering Ghazal
Skipping down childhood’s street in a dream.
Two teams of angels compete in a dream.
Bodies (Two Poems by Alison Stone)
Doing Yoga, I Think About Simone Biles And My Nonbinary Child
That Month
Wrists bound with satin cords, they wed in June.
Till death or an affair, he said in June.
Moon-fuelled, she keeps each man a month, shows her
faces to Caleb in May, Ted in June.
Second Pandemic April
Windows open. Snowdrops up. Arms bare. Spring!
She wants her hands in dirt. No armchair spring.
Before Resurrection
Drunks drive down streets where kids play. Someone dies.
A white boy has a bad day. Someone dies.
Insurrection Snapshots
Words aren’t swords, or bombs,
gunpowder, guns, dragons.
Not a scaffold with a waiting noose.
Words aren’t religion, airplanes,
torn-out panic buttons,
flagpoles or fire extinguishers.
Not a zip tie. Not a wick.
Just the flame.
Tactile Ghazal
Locked down with family, I’m blessed with touch.
People-heavy days, pets give the best touch.
Nine Minutes (i.m. of George Floyd)
Five hundred forty seconds.
Time in which an athlete
Can run a mile and a half.
A couple can have rushed,
Workday-morning sex.
A teacher can teach about the stars.
A killer can keep his knee
On the neck of a man.
America Hunkers Down
Hands scrubbed till they bleed.
School replaced with videos.
Carts crammed with toilet paper and guns.
Caught in the Myth: Poems by Alison Stone
Your editor’s response to Alison Stone’s new book Caught in the Myth, echoes the last s-y line of her poem “Dionysus”: “Let the words to every song be yes.” Stone has always done Dionysian better than most yes-men. That’s because she doesn’t shut her eyes and ears to what’s really real. Heroin or her cunt may have been her chariot to a “sacred other place” but she’s fully alive to what’s going on in our mean world (“thick with caste”).
Nile. Hudson. Rio Grande.
i.m. Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and Valeria Ramirez