Alison Stone

Sartorial Ghazal

Please don’t ask if you can wear my black pants.

I adore you but won’t share my black pants.

Too often, the world requires armor.

With red lipstick and teased hair, my black pants.

Rip my shirt off, let the buttons pop. Break

my bra’s thin clasp, but don’t tear my black pants.

The spell’s broken, you say. You want to go

home to your marriage. Beware my black pants.

Dead sea mud smoothes and wakes my skin. Like a

facial for my derriere—my black pants.

Shy days demand baggy, ankle-length skirts.

When I want people to stare, my black pants.

Yearly cull of clothes too small, too worn, no

longer loved. I always spare my black pants.

Boxers dangling from a lampshade. Tangled

with your jeans under the chair, my black pants.

You sew carefully, aware you’ll win my

devotion if you repair my black pants.

Older, Stone’s learned less is so much more.

Sexier than my ass, bare—my black pants.

Romantic Ghazal

To shared values, add a dash of romance.

Drape commitment in a sash of romance.

One suitor is an heir. One writes songs. Should

she choose the dazzle of cash? Of romance?

After kids, fatigue, and disappointment,

bright as spring’s first bird—a flash of romance.

He journeyed from flower shop to bar to

religion, spurred by the lash of romance.

Room strewn with empty wine bottles, torn clothes,

dead roses, condoms—the trash of romance.

Come here. Now go away. Sharp words. Kisses.

Her neck aches from the whiplash of romance.

When bills and boredom dampen ardor, pull

happy memories from the cache of romance.

A slinky dress, a rhinestone crown. Eyes rimmed

with Smoke. On each wrist, a splash of Romance.

Let stubborn shoots push through cracks in stone. Let

nascent love rise from the ash of romance.

Dark Ghazal

She snuffs all the candles to find the dark.

The god used golden cords to bind the dark.

Did Cleopatra suffer when she felt

the final threads of self unwind, the dark

replacing everything? Rumi plucked gems

from the divine, Baudelaire mined the dark.

Black cats are chosen last. The Horned God morphed

to devil when some faiths aligned the dark

with evil instead of mystery. In

Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, light defined the dark.

Teens say, That’s so extra!  Adults say, free gift.

When the astronomer went blind, the dark

held memories of stars. Each night, the girl

would brush her mother’s thick hair, wind the dark

strands into a bun. The boy’s aunt taught him

to keep secrets and not to mind the dark.

The sun spent its last oranges and pinks.

Night descended while they dined, the dark

obscuring faces and plates. The bomber

mailed police a confession signed The Dark

Avenger. Do dying patients reach for

a nurse or toward some world behind the dark?

Some subjects won’t be caged by words. Do you

really think, Stone, that you’ve enshrined the dark?

Counterpoints

The sky so blue before the airplanes hit.

Words of praise can land where bullets miss.

Shadows come to life from lamps we lit.

The same lips that curse can also kiss.

Words of praise can land where bullets miss.

Hate’s hidden under fear but never gone.

The same lips that curse can also kiss.

Too quickly a new darkness follows dawn.

Hate’s hidden under fear but never gone.

When one shoe thuds, we know what’s coming soon.

Too quickly a new darkness follows dawn.

Clouds can eclipse even the brightest moon.

When one shoe falls, we know what’s coming soon.

Find joy in the spaces in between.

Clouds can eclipse even the brightest moon.

Past disappointments set up every scene.

Find joy in the spaces in between

the losses. Stacked up like dirty plates,

past disappointments set up every scene.

Still, hope is power that no pain negates.

Although losses stack up like dirty plates,

and shadows come to life from lamps we lit,

hope is power, and no pain negates

the sky—so blue before the airplanes hit.

The Objects of My Adolescence

Torn fishnets, hand-drawn Ramones shirt,

mohawked Barbie head

stuck on a stick—are they

in a landfill somewhere, slimy

with food scraps, trapped next to

charm bracelets and hair clips

from the preppy girls who taunted me,

or are they mixed with the recliners

and wine glasses of parents

whose suburban comforts we scorned?

Before people break down and blend together,

our possessions precede us. A garbage dump,

and not our country, is the true melting pot,

receptacle for refuse of movie stars and janitors,

boxes labeled in myriad languages,

unimportant trash joined with once-loved

mementos of shed selves,

4.9 lbs. per person, per day,

decomposing slowly, if at all,

except for the few treasures we save

to pass along, my spiked bracelets

safe for now from this sad fate,

sharp and shiny on my daughter’s arm.

Alison Stone has published nine full-length collections, including Informed (NYQ Books, 2024), To See What Rises (CW Books, 2023), and Zombies at the Disco (Jacar Press, 2020). She has been awarded Poetry’s Frederick Bock Prize, New York Quarterly’s Madeline Sadin Award, and The Lyric’s Lyric Prize. Her websites: www.stonepoetry.org and www.stonetarot.com.

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JC Reilly

My Sister Dances to David Bowie, and I Get Caught Up in It: A Mood

“Let’s Dance” slurs on the stereo, Bowie’s voice sexy if

straining, like he’s smoked too many Camels. You

sway along to funk and dance and rhythm, heart captured, say

your love for him tastes like the blues, like salt. You run

the tape back and play the song again, twirling in time. I’ll

slouch to the couch from the floor to leave your legs room to run

through your dance routine. He doesn’t sing to me with

any great gift—no shivers here—though it’s clear he spirits you

to his secret realm under the serious moonlight. You glow, and

cheeks pinken as you’re drawn deeper into the dance. If

I spoke, you might turn from sylph to sudden kid sister, you

might loosen from the hypnotic state that keeps you astir. I say

nothing. Don’t even hum. Rapture like a silver scarf can hide

nothing of your light. At the last note, you come back to yourself. We’ll

let the rest of side one play; flip to side two. Then—a shift. I sense you hide

now, withdraw. The dance was not for me to see, because

it belongs to your David, a moment like a pearl. But I’ll share my

truth, anyway, that somehow I saw you transformed by love,

like a thousand doors opened with black and white keys for

you. Love, that terrorist, takes everyone hostage, except you

don’t mind—no girl with her first love does. Would

David love you back? If you were grown, why not? He’d break

like a geode full of amethyst for you, he’d fall so hard. My

fancy catches me in its basket with a start—whose heart

preoccupies me now? Yours or David’s? Is mine too in-

clined toward romance, that golden pebble, no matter what two

people are involved? I think I want to dance now too, I say, if

that’s ok. You hesitate, but your “boyfriend” won’t wait, and you

nod as you set the tape up again. David sings, and I should

feel silly dancing in the living room, the two of us, fall-

ing into the rhythm, me mirroring your moves, but I’m into

it, feel the way his voice starts to stir the cold stew of my

imagination. But you—already you spin, a vortex in invisible arms,

forgetting anything not him. We’ll spend the hour this way, and

another tomorrow and the next, till you sigh and tremble

from exhaustion, the afternoon dance whirling to a finish like

a dune in a gale. Somehow you’ve endeared me to Bowie a

bit, and as for you, something of the woman you’ll be begins to flower.

            A Golden Shovel after David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”

            (Let’s Dance, 1983)

Deer Season

They amble these hills, follow the track of other deer.

Tussock tamped down, leaves nibbled—a pack of deer.

A doe groans and pushes in high brambles and grass,

down and up she gets, another push—an amniotic sac of deer.

An early moon rises on the scroll of night: a patter

of hooves, a snap of twigs, the shadow black of deer.

In a meadow glossed gold with dandelions,

a sudden spring hosts dozens of laid-back deer.

The faun, polka-dotted, nurses from his mother. She eats

the afterbirth for protection and health—a snack of deer.

Beneath a cluster of pines, two young bucks spar:

grunting and huffing—the antler smack of deer.

The way the sunlight makes them glisten in the fields.

The way the woods hide the cognac fur of deer.

The doe admires her faun who rolls in a patch

of wild violets. A blanket of sky to the backs of deer.

The herd pads through the underbrush slow and steady

until a crash—they swing around—the double-back of deer.

From my window I watch the edge of the forest

for their movements—jot notes in my almanac of deer.

C Reilly has work published or forthcoming from 300 Days of Sun, Sheila-Na-Gig, Dunes Review, and others. When she's not writing, she crochets, plays tennis, and practices her Italian. She lives in Marietta, Georgia, with two cats who hate each other. Follow her on Twitter @Aishatonu, on Bluesky @Aishatonu.bsky.social, or on Instagram @jc.reilly.

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Michael Dwayne Smith

Art Made from Happiness Is Shit

There’s a poem out there somewhere that begins

“When I look in a mirror, I see myself seeing myself.”

So that’s where we start: I dreamed I made a movie

about my imaginary Japanese girlfriend. Later,

in the hotel, she kept me up all night as a delightful

poem. Sure, the food was expensive. And I didn’t

shower for days. Something was lurking in the obvious

fiction of the obvious danger I wanted to marry.

One morning she hopped out of bed and put on this

flirty skirt, nipple pink of course, as a dream would

make it in a head like mine, and I remember thinking

I should be lonely, but I’m not. I’m sitting in an

expensive decorative chair in a New York hotel room

naked and alive and willing to follow this middle-

school-feeling relationship anywhere. Afterlife

occurred as a possibility to me, also just plain

faking it, or worse: a paucity of imagination. Still,

she was happily some part of my personality, and I

was attracted to her in a pleasantly desperate way.

She let me try on her clothes. She dyed her hair

blue then red then green then blue again. I lay

for hours on my belly, nestled in the warm covers,

head propped in my hands, and watched her whirl

backwards asking, How shall I wear my identity?

Let’s Crash

It’s Lou Reed’s birthday, so I put on Laurie Anderson’s

Heart of a Dog, have a good cry for all my animals in their

selfless deaths, echoes of my helplessness in both ears—

how I searched their faces while little black clouds

settled in their eyes. I’m sticking my tongue down the

throat of the Bardo. Sometimes I think like Los Angeles,

though more Echo Park than Santa Monica. Actually, a

hot afternoon solo on Pico at Tacos El Tamix, gorging in

silence on their alambre (a hash of sautéed al pastor, chili

peppers, onions, bacon, and Oaxacan cheese), tastes pretty

lonesome, too, like how Roy Orbison always looked secretly

sad even when singing about beautiful women. I know these

liquor stores, graffitied churches, and smog-choked palms,

Porsches, porches, Adderall, flea markets, knives, guns,

rape spray, straight or gay, Chinese New Years taking

both wallet and breath away, movie stars you think you’d

like to meet, Venus as a boy down an unlit side street, from

the valley to the hood, city in every direction but up, city

disguised as a body, from Mexican Korea Town to Rich

White Ghettos, its histories knotted like the veins of a

Tarantino mock-umentary on speedball, we the blood to

the brain and the asshole, doped expansive on rock-’n’-roll

’n race, nourishing this body without a face. On second

thought, let’s do Santa Monica, let’s crash Chez Jay for an

Angus steak, and after all the martinis and Wild Turkey

shots, it will be, of a sudden, last call—we’ll amble into a

two-a.m. fog that skims the arc-light street as we circle

block after block, forgetting where we parked our lives.

Michael Dwayne Smith haunts many literary houses, including Bending Genres, The Cortland Review, Gyroscope Review, Gargoyle, Third Wednesday, Heavy Feather Review, Monkeybicycle, and Chiron Review. Author of four books, recipient of the Hinderaker Poetry Prize, the Polonsky Prize for fiction, and multiple Pushcart Prize/Best of the Net nominations, he lives near a Mojave Desert ghost town with his family and rescued horses.

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