Nomi Stone
Turning 35
My sister is making me squash soup, and the vines are burred with bees suckling tiny
buds. Hunger
knives the gourds open, their cello throats of seeds. I love her more now than ever. I love
the child in her,
and once the child is in the air of the world and I can carry her, I will love her without
the knife shaving
into loss. My sister asks if my lover loves me enough to keep me, to make out of love
a child.
But there is a taste in me for salt, the beloved everyday halving then re-growing
into losing.
In a month, a new person will come into the air of this world and I will carry
the child, carrying
curled within her the DNA for the next child, and all this, love, will fit into my arms.
Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. She is also the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and was a Creative Writing Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, The Best Emerging Poets 2014-15, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, diode, and elsewhere. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Visit her website here: http://nomistone.net/index.html
Return to January 2017 Edition
My sister is making me squash soup, and the vines are burred with bees suckling tiny
buds. Hunger
knives the gourds open, their cello throats of seeds. I love her more now than ever. I love
the child in her,
and once the child is in the air of the world and I can carry her, I will love her without
the knife shaving
into loss. My sister asks if my lover loves me enough to keep me, to make out of love
a child.
But there is a taste in me for salt, the beloved everyday halving then re-growing
into losing.
In a month, a new person will come into the air of this world and I will carry
the child, carrying
curled within her the DNA for the next child, and all this, love, will fit into my arms.
Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2018. She is also the author of the poetry collection Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly, 2008), a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Anthropology at Princeton University, and an MFA Candidate in Poetry at Warren Wilson College. She has a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University, and was a Creative Writing Fulbright Scholar in Tunisia. Poems appear or are forthcoming in The New Republic, The Best American Poetry 2016, The Best Emerging Poets 2014-15, Poetry Northwest, Sixth Finch, diode, and elsewhere. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. Visit her website here: http://nomistone.net/index.html
Return to January 2017 Edition