Tryst
mid-afternoon
the hotel corridor is quiet
outside our room where feeble light
dulls bleached sheets
later on when the sky is due
to erupt and hasten darkness
wrapped in a fog shroud
I have a fifty-mile drive home
but right now I am malleable
beneath your calloused palms
I am a well-fed bird eager to settle
within the coarse and tender
the flesh-and-bone
nest of you
Unincorporated Places
at night you drive, alert for deer and drunks
while I gaze west, my retinas gather the glow
of stray porch lights and second-story windows
from communities tucked into collarbone hollows
along the interstate, which reeks of a paper mill
some of their names I mispronounce, but you never
correct the strange syllables in my mouth
Tenuous is the Thread
chaos barely constrained
by butterfly wings that make figure eights
yet tectonic plates
gnash their teeth and continents break
could be a low-flying plane
or seismic shudder
either way the dust is disturbed—
a flurry of near-microscopic birds
and the concrete slab fractures
as earth swallows this house in one slow gulp
Eve’s Burden
Since I do not plan to become pregnant
the doctor suggests endometrial ablation
and I hear it as oblation.
Unfamiliar with the word,
I return to the office and grab my battered dictionary.
Oblation: the act of offering something to God.
***
M. Stone is a bookworm, birdwatcher, and stargazer living in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in San Pedro River Review, UCity Review, formercactus, and numerous other journals. Find her on Twitter @writermstone and at writermstone.wordpress.com.
