Alison Stine's first book of poems, Ohio Violence, won the Vassar Miller Prize and was published by the University of North Texas Press in April. She is also the author of the chapbook Lot of My Sister, winner of the Wick Prize (The Kent State University Press 2001). Her poems, stories, and essays have been published in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Kenyon Review, Tin House, Gulf Coast, New England Review, and many others. Her awards include a Wallace Stegner Fellowship from Stanford University, and a 2008 Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She is currently at PhD Candidate in English at Ohio University, and teaches at Denison University.

Purchase her collection, Ohio Violence, and her chapbook, Lot of My Sister.

 

Dream Anatomy

They’ve all come down at once,
the leaves, as if this much was agreed

upon at least, this exodus spiking

the wet grass. The trees are dark
with balm, the soil so thick

with minerals; here sorrel survived

a winter, frostless, each palm leaf
spreading uneaten and deepening

with dirt. The thyme turned in

on itself, so delicate, cast like sugar.
In the spring I killed a snake.

Edging the beds, heel hard

on the shovel plane, half a moon-tiled
            belly churned up, garden body

                        bloodless, so neat I believed

it might heal, grow another
like the armless earthworms. I kept

shaking the blade, turning the pieces

over and over in the wide earth.
But it is not spring, and the conversation

turns to dreaming, as it will,

standing between the kitchen
and the next room, warm drinks

abandoned. It’s someone’s party,

but we’re not sure whose, how we
got here, how soon we’ll be leaving.

On the threshold, a woman swears

she writes a C on her hand before sleep,
each night in dream asking, am I conscious?

Am I conscious? In my nights,

our bodies shrink and stretch.
I would touch you except you keep

changing. I would damp in your hands,

but your hands would pass through me—
a slick deck, spread of tendrils, each finger

with its own white face. If I am lucid,

then the chives. Then the basil, balled
with blooms. If I am dreaming, then you are

as you always are, what should

have been, what is. And is this not
in the first person? And was I not wrong?

Always? About everything?

"Dream Anatomy" was originally published in New England Review

Curfew

I am late again, my body keeping its blood-store
inside my belly like a stone. What does it need
with all that blood? I have no use for a child.

I was a child. I wandered through the green wall
to neighbors’ yards, my hair pinned with box
hedge leaves. My mother warned against the sky,

but I swear I did not see it change, or it changed
so quickly, gray to green like water deepened.
That summer a man wore heels, a white wig,

and walked our streets. We swore he watched us
in our sleep. From a block away, he whistled,
his light hair hardly distinct from clouds.

When they went in his house they found
rooms decorated for daughters—a red bike, a rope.
I know the difference between late and lacking.

I know what waits in me, dark spot, clinging
wire. How else was I to gauge my time, my life,
but to walk past him, turn around, then run?

"Curfew" was originally published in Gulf Coast

Blame

Now you are bare inside me.
Blood marks our movements. Let it

line you. How it reminds you of her,

the woman you loved, the baby lost as she lay
beneath you. There was nothing, and then

there was. You rocked and fell out again,

and pressed between your legs like a flower,
thin as wet paper, a beating brown sac: the boy

in his beginning, the imprint, the ash. It was

not your fault. Everything killed the bees:
chess-headed clovers, spring loaded with gas.

Winter. Ice lined the combs like smoke

through the lungs. They were drawn to death,
clotting the heart of a bull, the muscle gilded

with stings, dripping, an asp, and then

they were drawn back out again. A virus: one
brought it back to the others. They are like

that. There is no right way to say this.

You were happy and tired, and I wanted to take
both things from you, the way our clothes

fell like apples sliced from your knife, the way

the woods sighed open, each fiber, each leaf.
I parted for you. In the field, we split the air,

our bodies as white as the garden. What would

make the moon come down to the garden?
Lilies and mirrors she had strung on the fence,

feverfew, Anne’s lace, to echo its light.

It was not your fault it rose, a beaten coin,
thumb-worn, west—to turn from her flowers,

to strike at nothing, gravel, pewter-luck grass.

She turned from her flowers, from starlight,
            from you. In the black spill of the barn,

                        I was waiting. It is not my fault.

I want to go back. I want to stay standing,
            there in the field, as we were. We hung,

                        not moving, just fastened: your body,

an axis; my body, a hinge—one inside the other
            upon which the world.

"Blame" was originally published in Phoebe