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.
After Stone’s Dazzle got a rave review, her publisher tried to post quotes from that review and a link to it on Facebook. No go! Censorious community-standards bearers rejected the post since it cited Stone’s poem “On the Anniversary of Kristallnacht, Donald Trump is Elected President,” which First published in 2016. You can read that poem here and Stone’s publisher’s notice is appended at the end of this post…B.D.
Pleasure
Jasmine, cashmere, sex, tart slurp
of clementine, the ocean’s spar-
kle. So much sple-
ndor; endless ways to lure
a person from the mind’s pure
abstraction into the senses’ sure
to-end-at-some-point delight. Pause,
Savor. Let the world please
you. Don’t settle for pale,
idea-filled days. Let joy slap
you out of sleep.
Methadone
German chemists made
it pleasureless. Bogus as a porn star’s moan.
We sneered at the tame
patients cued around the clinic. Savage with teen
dreams, we blasted “Death
or Glory” from stolen boomboxes. Sharpened dull need-
les on matchbooks. Used wrists, then
ankles when our arms scarred. Our own damn
bodies tossed us from Eden.
Sick, broke, we watched a pompous worker mete
out 60 miligrams. Took the bitter liquid from her hand.
Abandonment
Tossed aside, I’m dull. Toad-
ugly. Dumb. Battered. Bent.
Each muscle and tendon
aches. Whatever I did wrong, let me atone.
Friends offer vodka, swear I’ll mend.
One morning, I wake up. It’s done.
Birds no longer chirp your name;
the sun’s insistent yellow might mean
promise. When you can’t get a date,
feel lonely, scared, don’t
call. I’ll be fucking a new lover with abandon.
Pregnant
I felt the womb pang
when you attached. Smaller than a gnat
but limitless. Blank page
filled with possibility. Great-
est midlife gift the gods could grant.
Let me be worthy. Let me earn
the privilege of you, leave rage
and selfishness behind the way a trap-
ped wolf chews off its foot. Let any harmful part
of me be gone before you tear
me open, leave me love-dazed, terrified. A parent.
Cribs and Falling Coconuts
My neighbor glares at my new dog.
A puppy, she’s all wiggles and licks,
but wide jaw and brindle fur mark her
a menace to our neighborhood.
Those things kill kids you know.
Pit bulls kill 2.48 people per year.
Forty children per year drown
in five gallon buckets. Also per year,
more than 100 people choke to death
on ball point pens.
Though the pup offers her belly,
fear chews through facts, digs
under reassurances. Grabs
and shakes and won’t let go.
She seems sweet,
but aren’t you scared?
Terrified —
of bomb plots, in-law visits,
hospitals, heights, Lyme ticks,
pesticides, the Christian Right.
Now, learning walk-to-heel (step,
call, leash tug, kissing noises,
praise, kneel, praise)
I’m calm, focused, lost in dog.
Oblivious to future horrors.
Fear’s jaws, for the moment, slacken.
Bird
It’s hard to write about happiness
without sounding smug, dumb,
Hallmarky, derivative, dishonest.
Just as doggerel threatens,
suffering swoops in to rescue you,
take you back to the land
of quirky, black-clad unfortunates,
the familiar smoky bar or tense bedroom.
Velvet Underground on the stereo.
Stale cake in the fridge. So many
metaphors for hunger.
So many slammed doors.
Your obsessive lugubriousness
cooler than the silly leap
your trite heart made this morning
when, tossing balls for the dog,
you looked up and saw a finch whose
yellow feathers gleamed so brightly,
you swelled with ordinary,
it’s-been-said-already joy.
xxx
“The poems in Dazzle are impossible to look away from. The mind’s eye is drawn to the shapes of these poems and how they shatter and reform within the confines of their structures. The collection does indeed ‘create landscapes inside crates,’ while demanding the reader ‘Imagine how they hold a body’…Stone’s poems, by adhering to external poetic structures, examine a life marked by addiction, attempts at love, and our harsh political reality…
There are mirrors and seaglass throughout [Dazzle‘s final section] ‘Free,’ culminating in the magnificent ‘On the Anniversary of Kristallnacht, Donald Trump is Elected President.’ As if history were in an obsessive loop, addicted to violence, Stone writes, ‘It starts with breaking glass.'”
Excellent review of Dazzle by Alison Stone, in the latest issue of Solstice.