Thrush Poetry Journal
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Alison Stine
​

Service
 
I understand that not everyone will get this.
Leaving your house I saw an Amish woman
 
pedaling hard on the beaten roads, the bicycle
and her dress. Behind her, the umbrella
 
rode in a white wagon, held by the tiniest pink
hand … What do I know. I wear a shirt of skulls.
 
I paint my toes a color called ‘Hope.’ I never got
to photograph the drive-in before the screen
 
rotted down. And now it is a rust why.
The lattice of a dead whale. A board without
 
an x or o. I only believe what my body tells me,
and what it said when the leather went around,
 
when you told me to write on my skin …
when you said, you said ... The lung-shaped bruise
 
is only the beginning. Try to understand.
When you have no purpose, you drift; there
 
is the devil. Better to let him, let him … When
the leash snapped on like an ice mouth,
 
when the length wrapped around once,
twice … This is the purest
 
sweetness I have known: a kind of locking
into place, a kind of glazing, a kind of remembering
 
what never happened and is always
happening in a men-circled field, in a shed
 
in Kendallville, in a room before I was born.
What happened was the woman’s face
 
was rain. But her body was will.
And pain. And the love that comes
 
From pain. That’s you. Or maybe,
that’s me. Outside on your marsh,
 
evening settled into same. The frogs lowed.
The swan was returning to the woman’s
 
house for bread. If the water was salt,
it would be rising. What you described
 
on my face: a peaceful fear.




Sprawl
 
The unfinished houses creep
ever closer in a coven of mud
 
and runaway field mice.
The farmer has sold off
 
the last of his fields. If you
listened to the mother cows,
 
ears pricking in the tassels,
they would tell you: Run.
 
Run. Love is different than
wishing. The noise of a highway
 
is not like a train. You want
a home you don’t need a home
 
away from. In afternoon light,
a man takes off his ring.




Alison Stine’s most recent book of poetry is Wait (University of Wisconsin Press), and her most recent book of fiction is a novella, The Protectors (Little A). An NEA Fellow, her work has appeared in Poetry, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, Tin House, The Guardian, and others. She lives with her son in the Appalachian foothills. Visit her website here: www.alisonstine.com



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