Maureen Alsop, Ph.D. is the author of Mantic (Augury Books), Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag), and Mirror Inside Coffin (forthcoming, Cherry Grove). Her poems have appeared in numerous magazines including Kenyon Review, Tampa Review, Switchback, Konundrum, New Delta Review, Versal, Typo, and Barrow Street. Her awards include: Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award. She edits poetry for Poemeleon, and teaches locally through the Inlandia Institute and online with the Rooster Moans poetry cooperative. Her website can be found here.---------
With this Eve
The three windows of your house appear a flooded horizon. Lakes inscription, or a conviction of newness. Pale sleeves, the front shadows, constellations cross an emptying shoreline, death’s disordered border. A secret path, scented bergamot. I’ll send you a postcard to the stars in chance.
Delivery and failure. The street lamps angles of leaves.
I stand at the wardrobe touching your dresses, speech matching the shape of old conversations. Your voice, an air among the dreamless lens. Earrings a clover field, now sky a crook in the drape of multitudes. My language, my variegated wheat without origins. Lightly I press my fawn hooves to soil. Stamp of arrangement, rise now through reeds. Moss grows over this shelter. The violet solitude prayer makes of home.
Pontiac
You only believed loved ones claimed certain fields.
Only
of snow, your belief
—when you passed between burials,
she named her ghost. Unlike you
she didn’t wait. The merciless sun’s
bead
upon your back wouldn’t yield. You wished
to forget this
or wished to forget
what
began before she was there. Suppose
she was you, without any theory of
season. Suppose
it was midnight in the small center
of town, her name
uttered by the lips of soldiers.
It’s late now. Counsel your thirst.
A circle of flies guides your brow. Addition
by subtraction.
Along the cliffs
ice dark sparks as
pine
blossoms early.
This winter is without
limit.
Gabion
Beautiful it is when you say I am. As when
an army unloads a basket of stones. Unsteady
shoreline
or fence line. Our
invisible boundary mapped by water-edge & light.