Stacey Waite has published three collections of poems: Choke (winner of the 2004 Frank O'Hara Prize in Poetry)
, Love Poem to Androgyny (winner of the 2006 Main Street Rag Chapbook Competition), and The Lake Has No Saint (winner of the 2008 Snowbound Poetry Prize from Tupelo Press). Her poems have been published most recently in The Cream City Review, Interim, Knockout and Black Warrior Review. Stacey's poem “Trans,” which appears in Knockout and the anthology I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Stacey’s full-length collection, Butch Geography, will be published by Tupelo Press in 2012. Click here for a schedule of Stacey's Readings and Events: Click here to purchase Stacey's latest collection and see sample poems:--------
when after the body
then she will tile the floor
echo
then the spinning of laundry
all afternoon for a rainstorm
waited
the highway holds out
the names of cities
for the horizon
where abandoned homes
turn shades of blue
empty
the mouths of rivers
short of breath
then she will not be
coming home the campfires
their hands
when in summer the sound of deep rain
for maureen
the plant and its moth leaves
your grandmother's handwriting
i, in dutiful body, measure
the altar table
the neighbor cursing
with his truck and wine
the cardboard boxes he drags
to the dumpsters out back
you are drinking the red chai tea
i carry pieces of the shrine
they do not break
though i imagine them breaking
it rains all night
you sort through old clothes in the back room
i'm up collecting words
we will mostly lose
in the morning more rain
we eat bread
we remember the bodies we were
the tree is not dying
look, your friends say,
look as though we are
not tied to the ground
as though we aren't all
standing beneath the grey branches
we cannot say from here of its life
we cannot say what we might see
elsewhere
the new house lit from both sides
white pine
farmland
the trees like bridges over head