The insects are loud tonight –
rough, monotonous music.
Bright city lights hide the stars.
The wind is undecided.
Alison Stone
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
Razzle Dazzle: Alison Stone’s New Poems
Alison Stone has been a vital voice in First of the Month‘s mixes for nearly 20 years. The following poems from her new collection, Dazzle, testify to her undimmed instinct for happiness inside the dailiness of life. Not that she’s Ms. Beamish. Stone often gives First first shot at her more engagé poems. One of them recently got up Facebook’s nose.
There Is No Gun
There is no gun in this poem.
Hey Ho, Let’s Go
One critic said that British punks sang anger, Americans, pain. But punk was more than emotion, more than the sense of humor the Ramones brought to the mix, more than the adrenaline rush of a live show, more than the aura of sex around everything.
Though if I Hurt Myself Doing it, at least I’ll Still Have Health Insurance
(Rondeau with a Line by Anthony Scaramucci)
Pretty Little Pantoum
Many characters kill people
in the show I watch with my daughter.
What is this teaching her?
The men take their shirts off, often.